Risque business has always been risky business in China, where the ruling Communist Party has long championed radical economic ideals but puritanical morals.
So it is that a traveling art show is breaking taboos because of its devotion to a single subject: the naked human form. And the government has hardly blinked.
Since its debut two months ago, the country’s first exhibition of nude photographs has drawn thousands of visitors eager for a glimpse of art history in the making and, no doubt, a little skin.
Mapplethorpe it’s not: None of the 117 photographs could be classified as particularly seamy or steamy, at least by Western standards.
But in China, the show is avant-garde enough to have compelled state media to note society — now exposed to more new ideas and information than ever before — has somehow managed to stay intact despite the display of provocative pictures.
“Far from being shocked, Chinese audiences have calmly received the country’s first nude photo show,” the official New China News Agency reported, evidently having feared the possibility of mass turmoil.
The pioneering exhibition is the work of a Chinese photographer who spent a year and a half putting the show together, including considerable time spent trying to anticipate any legal and political hassles it might cause. A team of lawyers helped the photographer, She Shan, close loopholes and avoid pitfalls that might have doomed his project before he began.
That his efforts have been well-received thus far illustrates the small ways in which this nation is gradually opening up and its citizenry tugging at constraints that bound them in the not-too-distant past.
Just a dozen years ago, such a show could easily have earned organizers official criticism and punishment — if anyone even dared mount an exhibitionist exhibition in the first place.
Of the many thousands of visitors to the photo exhibition so far — granted, a self-selecting crowd — virtually none has raised any objections to what was on display.
