Slide / Show

From April 29 to August 13, 2023, UCCA presents Slide / Show: Light Images in Chinese Contemporary Art. Juxtaposing artworks with select archival materials, the exhibition proposes a new genealogy of the slide and its legacy in the foundational years of Chinese contemporary art, exploring the significance of slides and slideshows in the 1980s, and how they shaped creative strategies that would continue to echo through artists’ practices for decades to come. Participating artists include Geng Jianyi (1962–2017), Li Yongbin (b. 1963, Beijing), Liang Juhui (1959–2006), Lin Jiahua (b. 1953, Xiamen), Lin Tianmiao (b. 1961, Taiyuan), Song Dong (b, 1966, Beijing), Wang Gongxin (b. 1960, Beijing), Wang Wei (b. 1972, Beijing), Wang Youshen (b. 1964, Beijing), Zhang Peili (b. 1957, Hangzhou), and Zhu Jia (b. 1963, Beijing). The exhibition is organized into three sections drawn from the key formal characteristics and applications of the slide medium: “Transmission,” “Refraction,” and “Transparency.” Co-produced by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art and Institut pour la photographie des Hauts-de-France, Lille, Slide / Show is curated by UCCA Curator Holly Roussell. Following this presentation in Beijing, the exhibition will travel to Lille in 2025.

The collective public screening—most often a tandem routine combining film and magic lantern slides—rose in prominence as a key communication strategy in rural China under Mao Zedong. By the mid-1980s, imported 35mm color “slide” film became more broadly accessible in China, giving private individuals the possibility to produce images for projection with a simple camera. During this time of few technological alternatives, contemporary artists valued the slide for its ability to project high-quality color reproductions of artworks. Slides were appropriated for education, exchange, and exposure at home and abroad by China’s developing avant-garde. The exhibition’s first section, “Transmission,” introduces the slide medium and the slideshow, zooming in on the significance of this image technology in spreading ideas, inspiring new art forms, and constructing systems of influence within China’s art community during the 1980s. The materials on display include slides sourced from the personal archives of key figures in the history of Chinese contemporary art, including artist and educator Zheng Shengtian and critic and curator Fei Dawei.

As international exchanges and national debates on art increased exponentially during the 1980s, artists of the ’85 New Wave found themselves increasingly compelled to position their work, organize, and enter the international art market. Geng Jianyi, Zhang Peili, Lin Jiahua, and Wang Youshen created some of the first works of intermedia art in China during this period, capturing the experimental spirit of the time. The artists engaged in formal experiments to question how meaning is created and to confront visitors with their practices of viewing. The selected works in “Refraction” offer critical perspectives on messaging mechanisms, including screening events and the significance of image reproduction in communication. The installations here aim to replicate their original exhibition formats, recontextualizing these prescient artworks.

From the 1990s through the early 2000s, Chinese artists educated on slideshows brought Chinese contemporary art into the global conversation. In the 1990s, many artists traveled abroad for the first time, returning with fresh inspiration and new materials. Employing various new technologies to explore personal histories and contemporaneous concerns, the works by Wang Gongxin, Zhu Jia, Li Yongbin, Lin Tianmiao, Liang Juhui, Song Dong, and Wang Wei in “Transparency” engage with the formal legacy of the slide medium. Oscillating between diaphanous and fixed qualities, both projected and still images employ transparency to combine the present with the past, layering images to create novel sensory experiences. By positioning these artworks—more commonly approached through the frames of installation or new media art—as part of a continuum shaped by the slide projections and public screenings of the 1980s, Slide / Show makes a case for the slide’s continued relevance, putting forward the medium as a prism through which to observe anew China’s early experimental art.