First Look: Photofairs Shanghai 2016

The 2016 Photofairs Shanghai has grown through the previous two editions to be a highly-anticipated and hugely-popular occasion. Photography is a high-profile art form in Shanghai with the general public accepting both the artifice of studio photography, through the prevalent idiom of wedding photography, and street photography, where there is a appetite for staging different identities through “selfies” and posing.

This year Photofairs Shanghai, in the opulent and expansive Shanghai Exhibition Centre, built as the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building in 1955, presents 50 galleries from 24 cities in 15 countries. Galleries from South Korea, Belgium, Israel and Iran are all new features for 2016. For a quarter of the exhibitors this is their first outing in China. There is a feeling that this is as much a place to be seen as to look. Interestingly, despite the burgeoning profile of the show, this year’s edition seemed to move away from the large-scale statement works and present more modest, or perhaps just less gimmicky, items. Most of the exhibitors offered uncluttered displays and the soft and silvery grays of process photography created a pure classic look.

The fair boasts some new curatorial initiatives but the section entitled Connected, organized by Feng Boyi highlighting moving image work, was embedded in the existing displays by a selection of exhibiting galleries. Only, the Insights section, curated by Biljana Ciric, highlighting contemporary one-off photographic works got its own space toward the back of the show, but because of the position, it seemed like a footnote.

Highlights for this reviewer included a suite of Cecil Beaton’s images of ’50s celebrities, outlandishly dressed but affectingly humble; Shen Wei’s wildlife photography looking like informal portraiture, at Flowers Gallery (New York/London); Wang Man’s steamy images of the “manic state” achieved by assuming different identities at a cross dressing party at Chengdu’s L-Art Gallery; poetic emptiness in “On the Road” a mini retrospective of Chen Shun-Chu, at Beyond Gallery in Taipei; and a collection of small prints by Eva Rubinstein, of light in a forsaken London of the 1970s. Here’s a first look around Photofairs Shanghai during the preview.

Photofairs Shanghai is currently on view at Shanghai Exhibition Centre until September 11, 2016.