Ouyang Pu (歐陽溥) and Zhang Yuanheng (張元衡)
c. 1920s to 30s
Gelatin silver print, Shaanxi
This photograph exemplifies the emergence of a uniquely Chinese photographic modernism. Drawing from international pictorialist methods, soft focus lenses, matte bromide papers, and tonal manipulation, Chinese photographers sought not realism but resonance, aligning photography with the literati (文人) traditions of shan shui (山水) painting.
Perhaps using a Verito or Dallmeyer lens, the photographer achieves atmospheric softness, allowing pine branches and rock to dissolve into void with painterly fluidity. The composition is rooted in classical principles: asymmetry, depth through mist, and the poetic balance of presence and absence. In the darkroom, techniques like dodging and burning modulate contrast, while the print’s warm surface echoes the tactile quality of ink on paper.
Photographs like this were not translations of the landscape, but transformations of the medium. By embedding photography within Chinese aesthetic philosophy, artists of this period expanded both the language of photography and the definition of modern Chinese art. This photograph echoes the refined vision of Lang Jingshan, whose composite landscapes such as Majestic Mountains in Cloud demonstrate the evocative power of combining negatives to recreate the brushwork and spatial logic of traditional shan shui painting. Through the technique of combining negatives, which Lang Jingshan developed and refined from the 1930s through the 1950s, pictorial photography achieved a visual language deeply informed by classical Chinese aesthetics. Though executed with a single negative, Curious Rock and Old Pine achieves a comparable aesthetic effect. Using a soft focus lens, the photographer captures pine and stone in delicate tonal gradation, evoking the empty and full space central to literati painting.
Curious Rock and Old Pine’s atmospheric rendering and compositional elegance suggest deep engagement with both pictorialist technique and Chinese artistic philosophy. It exemplifies a modernist reimagining of native tradition through the lens of photography, bridging antiquity and innovation. This image belongs to the same intellectual and visual milieu that shaped some of the most enduring works of early Chinese photographic art.
Arthur de Carvalho
Early twentieth century
Gelatin silver print
This intimate portrait of a group of Shanghai children reflects Arthur de Carvalho’s sensitivity to the human dimension of urban life in early twentieth-century China. Departing from the monumental or architectural subjects that dominated much treaty-port photography, the image centers on the immediacy of childhood itself. The tightly compressed composition draws the figures into a shallow pictorial space, creating a sense of collective presence while preserving the individuality of each expression.
The children confront the camera directly, their varied gazes ranging from curiosity to reserve, amusement to solemnity. Such psychological diversity resists typological classification, emphasizing instead the irreducible specificity of lived experience. Their clothing, modest and practical, situates them within the rhythms of everyday urban life, while the close framing transforms an ordinary encounter into a study of attention, proximity, and relational awareness.
Within the broader history of photography in Shanghai, the image signals a shift from topographical documentation toward social observation. De Carvalho’s work participates in a growing modern interest in the human subject as both visual form and bearer of interiority. The photograph does not present children as ethnographic specimens or decorative figures but as autonomous presences, fully engaged in the act of being seen.
As an artwork, the image transforms fleeting social encounter into sustained visual contemplation, foregrounding the expressive potential of the photographic portrait in the evolving urban culture of modern Shanghai.
Portrait of Photographers
Ouyang Pu (歐陽溥) and Zhang Yuanheng (張元衡)
China, 1933
Silver gelatin prints, mounted for exhibition
Liangyou National Photography Tour emerged directly from Shanghai’s decisive role as the epicenter of photographic modernity in Republican China. By the early 1930s, Shanghai functioned not merely as a commercial metropolis but as the nation’s primary site of photographic production, publication, and aesthetic debate. As a treaty-port city shaped by global exchange, it sustained dense networks of studios, illustrated magazines, importedequipment, and international visual influences. Within this environment, Liangyou (The Young Companion), one of China’s most sophisticated pictorial periodicals, cultivated photography as both a modern art form and a medium of national self-representation. The 1933 Liangyou National Photography Tour represents the outward projection of this Shanghai-centered visual culture onto the national landscape.
Photographers Ouyang Pu and Zhang Yuanheng and their team worked within an aesthetic framework deeply shaped by Shanghai’s cosmopolitan intellectual milieu and by the pictorialist philosophy of Lang Jingshan. Their images synthesize the pictorialist techniques of soft focus, tonal modulation, atmospheric depth with compositional principles rooted in literati painting. Unlike Lang’s composite negatives, however, these photographs rely on single exposures, demonstrating technical control refined within Shanghai’s advanced studio and print culture. Spatial void, rhythmic balance, and restrained tonal structure reflect philosophical engagements with Song landscape aesthetics, while their formal clarity resonates with contemporaneous modernist experiments circulating through Shanghai’s illustrated press.
The tour’s objective was both documentary and cultural: to visualize a modernizing China through a photographic language shaped in Shanghai yet oriented toward national and international audiences. These works exemplify a distinctly Chinese modernism forged through continuity and an artistic experimentation made possible by Shanghai’s position as the country’s primary laboratory of photographic thought, technological innovation, and visual dissemination.
First constructed in 1559 during the Ming dynasty, Yuyuan Garden was conceived as a cultivated retreat shaped by the spatial philosophy of Jiangnan garden design. Long before the arrival of photography, the site was embedded in visual and literary culture through gazetteers, woodblock illustrations, and literati description, establishing its status as a landscape of aesthetic and symbolic significance.
This early photograph centers the celebrated Nine Bend Bridge, an architectural structure designed to choreograph perception through sequential turns and shifting vantage points. The bridge functions simultaneously as physical passage and visual instrument, organizing movement, framing views, and transforming spatial experience into rhythmic form. The camera translates this embodied progression into a fixed image, rendering circulation itself as compositional order.
Produced in treaty-port Shanghai, the photograph belongs to the formative moment when photography began to stabilize and disseminate canonical views of the city. It participates in the early visual codification of Yuyuan Garden, helping to establish the Nine Bend Bridge as one of the most enduring and recognizable motifs in Shanghai’s photographic imagination.
Ouyang Pu (歐陽溥) and Zhang Yuanheng (張元衡)
c. 1930s
Gelatin silver print
This photograph of Chinese junks sailing along the Bei Jiang (North River) exemplifies the tonal refinement and meditative structure of pictorialist photography. It employs a soft- focus lens on a large-format camera to compress spatial depth and soften detail across the distant hills. The river’s surface is rendered through delicate gradations of silver, suggesting the use of warm-toned bromide paper and extended exposure, perhaps with filtration to preserve highlight detail in water and sky. The image’s restrained tonality and rhythmic composition evoke the layered atmospheres of shan shui painting, here translated into the photographic medium.
Three vertical sails recede in measured intervals, their geometric clarity balanced by the organic textures of water and hillside. The boats align along a subtly curving axis that draws the eye into depth, echoing the spatial logic of traditional Chinese scroll composition. While stylistically pictorialist, with its emphasis on mood, void, and tonal harmony, the photograph participates in a broader moment of Chinese photographic modernism, in which inherited visual traditions were rearticulated through new optical technologies.
The work shares formal affinities with Western pictorial photography, including Edward Steichen’s The Flatiron (1904), where atmosphere transforms structure into poetic symbol, and Gustave Le Gray’s Brig upon the Water (1856), whose maritime subject and luminous tonal effects similarly evoke the sublime through the fusion of light and surface. Yet this image offers a culturally distinct counterpart, grounded in Taoist and literati aesthetics rather than European romanticism.
The photograph is not solely representational, it operates as a contemplative structure articulating harmony, distance, and stillness. It occupies a central position within the convergence of global modernist experimentation and enduring Chinese visual philosophy.
This photograph depicts a stone arch canal bridge in Suzhou, a city long celebrated for its intricate waterways and refined hydraulic landscape. By the late Qing dynasty, Suzhou occupied a distinct place within the visual culture of Shanghai. Easily reached by canal, it functioned for Shanghai residents as a nearby cultural retreat, a landscape understood as the preserved aesthetic world of classical Jiangnan. For photographers working in Shanghai, Suzhou offered not merely a destination but a canonical subject: a landscape in which architecture, water, and atmosphere are synthesized into a composition of remarkable pictorial coherence. Cammidge structures the image around the steep curvature of the primary arch, precisely aligned with a second bridge beyond it. This measured repetition produces a rhythmic recession through space, transforming the canal into a sequence of framed passages. Reflection, masonry, and winter-bare trees are reduced to essential tonal relationships, emphasizing balance, proportion, and visual cadence.
The bridge functions not only as architecture but as a formal device that organizes space and directs vision. As a work of art, the photograph translates Suzhou’s waterways into a disciplined pictorial system, rendering the landscape as an arrangement of line, mass, and tone. Circulating through Shanghai’s photographic networks, such images helped establish Suzhou’s bridges as enduring motifs within the region’s visual imagination, where historic landscape and modern image-making became inseparable.
First constructed in 1559 during the Ming dynasty, Yuyuan Garden was conceived as a cultivated retreat shaped by the spatial philosophy of Jiangnan garden design. Long before the arrival of photography, the site was embedded in visual and literary culture through gazetteers, woodblock illustrations, and literati description, establishing its status as a landscape of aesthetic and symbolic significance.
This early photograph centers the celebrated Nine Bend Bridge, an architectural structure designed to choreograph perception through sequential turns and shifting vantage points. The bridge functions simultaneously as physical passage and visual instrument, organizing movement, framing views, and transforming spatial experience into rhythmic form. The camera translates this embodied progression into a fixed image, rendering circulation itself as compositional order.
Produced in treaty-port Shanghai, the photograph belongs to the formative moment when photography began to stabilize and disseminate canonical views of the city. It participates in the early visual codification of Yuyuan Garden, helping to establish the Nine Bend Bridge as one of the most enduring and recognizable motifs in Shanghai’s photographic imagination.
Ouyang Pu (歐陽溥) and Zhang Yuanheng (張元衡).
c. 1930s
Gelatin silver print
This striking photograph captures rows of freshly thrown Yixing-style teapots aligned in a drying shed, an image of repetition, rhythm, and subtle abstraction that reflects both the material culture of Chinese craftsmanship and the rising visual sophistication of Chinese photography in the Republican era.
What might first appear as industrial documentation becomes, on closer inspection, a study in visual poetics. The rhythmic convergence of rounded forms and spouts creates a wave- like pattern of shadows and curves. The teapots echo one another but are not perfectly identical, a gentle nod to the hand of the artisan. The photograph’s tonal richness and soft focus suggest the use of a large-format camera with a moderately diffused lens, and warm bromide paper, allowing for fine midtones and atmospheric texture.
This image participates in the same aesthetic conversation as contemporaries like Lang Jingshan (郎靜山) and Liu Xucang (劉旭沣), artists who were also reimagining photography not just as documentation but as an art form rooted in Chinese cultural life. Unlike Lang’s spiritual landscapes, this photograph turns to the craft economy not with detachment, but with sensitivity to form, labor, and repetition as visual themes.
Thematically, it shares surprising common ground with other modernist photography of the same era. One might compare it to Albert Renger-Patzsch’s studies of industrial repetition or Edward Weston’s still lifes where ordinary forms such as peppers, shells, and machine parts are abstracted into aesthetic experience. Yet unlike Weston’s surrealism or the Bauhaus’s mechanized gaze, this image retains a human warmth, the echo of hands, the trace of utility, and the enduring presence of tea culture in Chinese daily life.
This photograph is a powerful testament to how early Chinese photographers approached modernism through a continuity of vision rooted in tradition, attentive to craft, and open to modern aesthetics. As curators and scholars continue to expand the narrative of photographic modernism, such images from China emerge not as footnotes but as essential contributions to a global story.
March 19 – May 19, 2026 Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 18, 6-8pm Exhibiting at: 10 West 18th Street, 7th Floor
Asia Week Hours: Tuesday to Thursday, 10am-5pm
We are excited to present Shanghai: A Century of Photography, 1850-1950 during this season’s Asia Week New York. This exhibition traces one hundred years of photographic art in Shanghai, from the city’s earliest paper photographs of the 1850s to its vernacular photography of the 1950s. Shanghai was one of the earliest locations for the emergence of photography in China. The city attracted foreign and pioneering Chinese photographers who captured the unique imagery of the cosmopolitan treaty-port era.
This exhibition presents some of the earliest photographic records of Shanghai, produced when the art of photography was developing in China. Early albumen views of the Bund, waterways, gardens, and commercial districts show how photographers responded to a rapidly transforming urban landscape, experimenting with scale, clarity, and vantage point. Shanghai remained the central locus of photographic art, modernist experimentation, and art publishing and distribution in China from the advent of photography into the 1950s. The city was a hub not only for images of Shanghai, but for photographs printed and circulated throughout the China and the world.
The exhibition brings together rare nineteenth-century views, portraits, and landscapes. Its range of twentieth-century vernacular works charts the evolution of photographic vision in Shanghai, combining art, commerce, and modernity. A rare and important group of gelatin silver prints from the 1933 Liangyou National Photography Tour documents an early effort to advance photography as a modern artistic medium in China.
VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
Seizing Shadows: Rare Photographs by Late Qing Dynasty Chinese Masters
The Loewentheil Collection’s first virtual exhibition presents a selection of the world’s finest nineteenth-century photographs of China by pioneering Chinese art photographers.
The exhibition draws from the Loewentheil Collection which was assembled over more than three decades of dedicated connoisseurship. The Loewentheil Collection comprises about 14,000 photographs spanning the earliest days of paper photography from the 1850s through the 1930s, the majority from before 1900. In addition, there are about 7000 photographs in the Loewentheil Collection from the Ernst Boerschmann Archive on the history of Chinese architecture.
The virtual exhibition presents photographs, many never before exhibited or digitized, by major early Chinese photographers and studios including Lai Fong, Liang Shitai, Pun Lun Studio, Tung Hing Studio, A Chan (Ya Zhen) Studio, Pow Kee Photographer Studio, Yu Xunling, and others.
This virtual exhibition offers the opportunity to view and explore rare early portraits including an iconic photograph of Empress Dowager Cixi by the Imperial photographer, Yu Xunling. Photography fascinated the Empress and she carefully orchestrated her portraits and tableaus. Another important portrait in the virtual exhibition is of the Marquis Li Hongzhang made by Liang Shitai, one the foremost nineteenth-century photographers. The compelling photograph conveys the Marquis’s power and inner character. The exhibition also presents some of the earliest photographic depictions of Chinese art and culture such as Lai Fong’s portrait of two Peking Opera performers.
Seizing Shadows: Rare Photographs by late Qing Dynasty Masters brings together selected works by the leading figures in nineteenth-century photography in China. Each is a pinnacle of photographic art worthy of study and exhibition.
To learn more and view the exhibition, click here.
