ST. LOUIS, MO.- On February 27, 2026, the Kemper Art Museum at WashU will open two thought-provoking exhibitions that critically examine the effects of our interconnected global world.

Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China presents forty-three photographs created in China between 1993 and 2006. Featuring the work of fourteen contemporary artists, this survey represents a wide cross section of the so-called new conceptual photography that flourished there in the decades following 1989—a year marked by the government suppression of students protesting social injustices and antidemocratic actions on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On view for the first time at the Kemper Art Museum, these glossy photographs—often beyond human scale—constitute a significant recent addition to the institution’s holdings of contemporary Chinese art donated by editor, publisher, and art collector Larry Warsh.

The exhibition is divided into three interrelated thematic sections which together explore how artists used performance and distinct photographic and aesthetic methods to capture, freeze, and criticize the new sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environment of China post 1989. 

The first section, The Presence of the Past, visualizes artists’ often ambiguous efforts to remember China’s distinctive cultural heritage amid rapid erasures of the nation’s histories and the rise of a globalized, ultramodern built environment. Artists including Hai Bo, Zhang Dali, and Wang Jinsong engaged with photography’s conceptual potential to record changes in the lived experiences of individuals and families, imaginatively connecting past and present—Hai Bo through family portraits composed of old and new photos and Zhang Dali and Wang Jinsong through their chronicling of China’s mass urban transformations.

East and West explores how photographers contested the permeation of Western cultural and consumerist values. Wang Qingsong created highly composed, cinematic tableaus that frequently resemble futuristic stage performances, using them as platforms to criticize the capitalist market economy. Other artists were similarly attentive to digital formats and futuristic imagery: Hong Hao, for example, repeatedly staged himself as a somewhat displaced consumer of Western culture in self-portraits such as Hello Mr. Hong (1998).

The third and final section, Performance and the Body demonstrates how artists employed experimental photography as a tool of self-expression. Rather than foregrounding the medium’s indexical and optical qualities that freeze the past, artists engaged their other senses such as taste and touch to focus on lived, bodily experiences. The artist Cang Xin took photos of himself while tasting physical objects, some of which feature explicit references to China, like a photograph of Mao. Other photographers such as Huang Yan sought to use their own body to physically connect to traditional Chinese fine arts practices, such as in his 1999 Chinese Landscape Series.

Also on view at the Kemper Art Museum this spring is The Song of the Germans, a sound installation produced by the internationally renowned Berlin-based Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh. First premiered at the 2015 Venice Biennale, it features a recording of ten African immigrants singing the German national anthem in their native languages (Bamum, Duala, Ewondo, Igbo, Kongo, Lingala, Moore, Sango, Twi, and Yoruba). The sound composition is played continuously, unfolding differently each time as one singer starts, and individual voices enter, gradually building into a full chorus. Created during a moment of peak immigration to Germany, Ogboh’s piece invites listeners to consider how sound shapes our emotional experiences and frames and reframes our understanding of national identity, multiculturalism, and (post)colonialism.

Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China is curated by Sabine Eckmann, the William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator at the Kemper Art Museum, with Elizabeth Mangone and Stephanie Nebenfuehr as curatorial research assistants.

The Song of the Germans is featured in conjunction with the symposium Archiving the Sounds of German Culture: A Century of Collection, Curation, and Creative Practice, organized by Associate Professor Caroline Kita and Assistant Professor Sarah Koellner in the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought in Arts & Sciences at WashU.