Ruins as an object of photographic representation in China in the first half of the 20th century

The aim of this article is to examine the question formulated by the photography critic Chen Guosen: why is the theme of ruins rarely represented in the work of Chinese professional art photographers? The article also enters into a scholarly dialogue with the monograph by the art historian Wu Hung. Although the aesthetics of ruins occupied a significant place in the history of Chinese art and literature, it did not develop into a stable tendency in professional photography for a long time. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the spread of photography was connected with two processes: the development of science, technology, and urban culture after the Industrial Revolution in the West, and the colonial expansion of imperialist powers together with the system of unequal trade. In this context, Western photographers working in China often turned to ruins as a subject of photography. By contrast, before the outbreak of the full-scale War of Resistance against Japan in 1937, Chinese professional photographers rarely treated ruins as an independent artistic motif. The article explains this through the operation of “tacit knowledge,” formed at the intersection of photographers’ artistic ideals and the historical experience of external aggression. The article uses an interdisciplinary method, including iconographic analysis, comparison of historical materials, and discursive and visual analysis. It shows that, in representing ruins, Chinese photographers were compelled to relate them to the destructive impact of imperial military power on everyday life. For this reason, their attitude toward ruins initially remained cautious. The gradual acceptance of the visual presentation of ruins within the Chinese photographic community was connected with the real conditions of war and the need to record a destroyed environment. The article also compares the practices of Western photographers in China with works created by Chinese artists during their stay in Europe. The representation of ruins is understood as a way of transforming the space of everyday life: the artist or photographer abstracts this space, removes it from its former functional order, and adopts the position of an external observer. The novelty of the article lies in expanding the problematics of the aesthetics of ruins through a dialogue with art history and the anthropology of place.