Image: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Berlin
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is showing 'Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China', a survey of more than forty large-scale photographs made in China between 1993 and 2006. The exhibition runs through July 20, 2026, in the museum’s Barney A. Ebsworth Gallery.
According to the museum’s newsletter, the exhibition features work by fourteen contemporary artists and offers a wide cross section of what it describes as the so-called new conceptual photography that flourished in China in the decades following 1989. The photographs were produced during a period the museum characterizes as one of tumultuous recent history, and the display brings together images that register the country’s radical transformations across those critical years.
The show’s title frames the project as both retrospective and forward-looking, and the selection centers on photography as a medium for tracking social change. The museum’s description emphasizes the scale of the works, which are presented as large-format photographs, and the breadth of the survey, which spans more than a decade of artistic production from the early 1990s through the mid-2000s.
Among the artists identified in the museum’s materials is Wang Qingsong, whose 2002 photograph 'Preschool' appears in the exhibition. The image credit in the newsletter notes that the work is part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s collection, gifted by Larry Warsh in 2024.
The exhibition is one of the items highlighted in the museum’s July e-newsletter, alongside other current and upcoming programming. In that same mailing, the museum notes that its current schedule also includes 'Apparition: 2026 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition' and Emeka Ogboh’s 'The Song of the Germans', each open through July 27, 2026.
The Kemper Art Museum also lists several public programs in July, including 'Kemper Refresh: Meditation and Creation' on July 8, 'What Remains: Artifacts, Memory, and Stories of Place' on July 15, and 'Storytime and Art-Making with EyeSeeMe African American Children’s Bookstore and Start with Art' on July 18. The museum says 'Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China' remains on view through July 20, 2026.
