A SHARP WINTER wind swept across the Huangpu River as I approached the West Bund Museum in Shanghai. The sky hung low and grey, casting a muted light over the city like a heavy ceiling. Still, the riverside promenade was alive with movement — clusters of people, bundled in coats and scarves, pressed forward with purpose. A young girl on roller skates glided back and forth, pausing to strike poses as a photographer captured her on video. Stepping inside, the contrast was immediate: warm air, soft lighting, and the quiet murmur of anticipation. I had come for Another Avant-garde: Photography 1970–2000, an exhibition I’d been eager to see since its November opening. As the gallery began to fill around me, I knew I’d arrived at just the right moment.
The museum itself is beautifully designed — a mix of austere modernity and quiet elegance. But the real magic was inside Gallery 3, where nearly 200 works from the Centre Pompidou’s photography collection have been brought together for this landmark show. Curated by Florian Ebner and Matthias Pfaller, the exhibition is structured across ten thoughtfully curated sections. Each one highlights the radical ways artists between 1970 and 2000 engaged with the medium, transforming how photography could look, feel, and function. Although early movements such as Pictorialism and New Objectivity argued for photography’s artistic value, it wasn’t widely accepted into museum collections as an art form until the 1970s. This makes the period covered in Another Avant-garde especially resonant — a time when photography began to claim its place within contemporary art institutions and critical discourse.
What struck me most — beyond the technical brilliance of the works — was the incredible diversity of artists and practices on display. The curators have assembled a group of international voices, each pushing photography beyond its traditional limits.
The journey begins with the A New Vision section, where Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women (1979) sets the tone. It’s a staged image that reads like a film still, engaging with ideas of gaze, gender, and the act of looking. From there, the exhibition opens into the Art for the Camera, featuring Carlos Leppe’s Acción de la Estrella (1979) and RongRong’s East Village, Beijing, 1994 No.2 — works that use photography as a primary medium for performance, documentation, and transgression.
The third section, Questioning the Image in Society, brings together critical voices such as Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, Hong Hao, Anna Bella Geiger, and Victor Burgin. Here, photography becomes a battleground of media, propaganda, and politics. Kruger’s iconic Untitled (Savoir c’est pouvoir) from 1989 hit me with its immediacy — bold, graphic, and unapologetically political. Seeing it in person reminded me how radical her voice still is.
The Questioning the Tool section shifts the focus onto the camera itself. Artists like Ugo Mulas and Chen Shuxia deconstruct the very act of image-making, turning the lens inward on the apparatus and its conventions. It’s followed by the Transforming the Portrait, one of the most engaging sections for me, with Suzanne Lafont’s enigmatic studies, Thomas Ruff’s analytical approach, Tseng Kwong Chi’s performative self-portraits, Cindy Sherman’s transformative identities, and Ma Liuming’s haunting presence.
In the Photography as Sculpture, the boundaries between photography and spatial installation dissolve. Artists like Luo Yongjin, Zhang Peili, and Jan Dibbets expand photography into three-dimensional thinking — using the camera not just to record space, but to bend it.
The quieter, more contemplative tone of Another Objectivity presents artists such as Sophie Ristelhueber and Hannah Collins. Their works felt like meditations — on ruins, memory, and aftermath. Then comes A World in Itself, a dreamlike section where Sandy Skoglund’s surreal installations meet the psychological intensity of Christian Milovanoff and Li Yongbin.
The Globalisation section captures the widening lens of the 1990s. Works by Andreas Gursky, Wang Fen, Frank Breuer, and Eric Baudelaire speak to the economic and visual transformations of the globalised world — slick, cold, vast, and disorienting. Gursky’s monumental scale feels almost overwhelming in person, making you hyper-aware of your own position in these sprawling systems.
Finally, Photography Today offers a contemporary coda. Here, Sara Cwynar, aaajiao, and Wolfgang Tillmans explore digital aesthetics, networked identities, and the current state of the image. These are artists for whom photography is no longer bound to the physical print — it’s hybrid, fluid, and often born on screens rather than in darkrooms.
The exhibition layout is spacious and fluid, with excellent bilingual (Chinese and English) texts and labels. Despite its scope, it never felt overwhelming — just incredibly rich. Each room presents a shift in both theme and energy, encouraging you to slow down and spend time with each image.
I found myself returning again and again to Suzanne Lafont’s black-and-white works — quiet yet commanding — and to Hong Hao’s poetic commentary on daily life in China. His Mr. Hong Usually Waits Under the Arch for the Sunshine (1998) stood out to me as a beautiful reminder of photography’s capacity for observation and reflection.
By the end of the exhibition, I felt like I had travelled not only through time, but across disciplines, geographies, and perspectives. It’s a show that asks you to think critically about photography’s role — not just as a visual medium, but as a cultural and political force.
Another Avant-garde. Photography 1970–2000 runs until 16 February 2025. If you find yourself in Shanghai before then, I can’t recommend it enough. Whether you’re a photography enthusiast, an artist, or simply someone curious about how images shape our world, this exhibition offers something rare: a beautifully curated, thought-provoking journey through one of the most transformative periods in photography’s history. And if you happen to go on a windy winter morning like I did, all the better — the cold outside makes the warmth of the images inside all the more powerful.
About West Bund Museum
Located in the Shanghai Corniche in Xuhui District, West Bund Museum is one of the core public cultural institutions that make up the famed West Bund Cultural Corridor along the Huangpu River Waterfront. Designed by renowned British architect Sir David Chipperfield, West Bund Museum first broke ground in 2017 and has been officially open to the public since 2019. In the inaugural year, the Museum joined hands with the Centre Pompidou for an unprecedented cultural partnership. With cultural exchange between China and the world as its mission and visual art, performance art, New Media art, and contemporary design as cultural throughlines, the collaboration between West Bund Museum and Centre Pompidou, with its disciplines of architecture, audiovisual experimentation, music, film, visual art, is forming an ongoing dialogue productively and vibrantly.
About Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project
The Centre Pompidou and the West Bund Museum signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2017. It was taken as the highest-level cultural cooperation project between China and France, and was included in the Joint Declaration between the People’s Republic of China and the French Republic in 2018. And in 2019, it opened to the public at the special moment of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the 55th anniversary of the establishment of Sino-French diplomatic relations.
For more information visit the museum’s website: www.wbmshanghai.com
