2025｜GLINTING LIGHT: AN EXPLORATION OF LUO BONIAN'S PHOTOGRAPHY
GLINTING LIGHT: AN EXPLORATION OF LUO BONIAN'S PHOTOGRAPHY
Artist:Lu Bonian
Curator: Hu Jiawen
Exhibition Organizer: Li Yuying
Organizer: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Presented in Collaboration with: Lu Bonian Art Foundation, Three Shadows +3 Gallery
Duration: April 4, 2025 – June 15, 2025
Exhibition Venue:** Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, No. 155A, Caodi Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Supported jointly by the Lu Bonian Art Foundation and Three Shadows +3 Gallery, "Glinting Light: An Exploration of Lu Bonian's Photography" made its debut at the 2024 Jimei x arles International Photo Festival, presenting the first solo exhibition in China of the renowned Republican-era photographer Lu Bonian. The exhibition is now on tour to the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. In December 2025, his works will be featured in the exhibition "Global Pictorial Photography" at the Tate Modern in the UK.
Focusing on the "self-taught" banker-photographer Lu Bonian, the exhibition highlights his photographic experiments and explorations from the 1930s to the 1940s. Nearly 100 gelatin silver prints, showcasing his distinct artistic style, will be exhibited, including works on humanities and landscapes, experimental collages, and still life arrangements. These not only demonstrate Lu's solid photographic skills but also reveal his unique insights into life and art. Rare private materials related to Lu Bonian's photographic studies will also be on display, such as imported books, film canisters, magazines featuring his works, and warm family and friend photos. Additionally, through interviews with Ms. Luo Hangyan, Lu Bonian's granddaughter who lived with him for nearly 40 years, the exhibition offers a more vivid and multidimensional portrait of Lu Bonian and his kaleidoscopic artistic world.
Mr. Lu Bonian, a significant photographer of the Republican era, was born in 1911 into a family of county -衙 (yard) officials in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Starting in 1932, he worked in banking in Zhejiang and Shanghai and took up photography as a hobby. Influenced by his father's love for calligraphy and painting, Lu was exposed to Confucian thought and traditional Chinese art aesthetics from a young age.
Lu Bonian's works were exhibited in "Chinese Photography: Since the 20th Century" at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in 2015 and later included in "Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art" at Tate Modern (2018) and "Professional Amateurs: The Emergence of Modernity - Lu Bonian and His Contemporaries, 1930s–1940s" at Taikang Space (2021). In 2021, his works were added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.