‘Documenting China’ photo exhibition opens March 25 at Hudson Museum
“Documenting China,” an exhibition of photographs by University of Maine Professor of Art Laurie Hicks, taken during three research trips beginning in 2010, will be on display March 25–June 30 at UMaine’s Hudson Museum.
An artist’s reception will be held from 5:30–7 p.m., March 31. The Hudson Museum, located in the Collins Center for the Arts, is open 9 a.m.–4 p.m., Monday–Friday; 11 a.m.–4 p.m., Saturday.
Hicks is a documentary photographer for the ChinaVine Project, which was created to make information about China’s cultural traditions accessible to an English language audience. In 2010, 2012 and 2015, she traveled with colleagues and students from the University of Oregon and University of Central Florida to document the work of contemporary artists and crafts people, and the cultural and material contexts in which they create. On the last two trips, Hicks also traveled with two UMaine alums.
The 20 images in the exhibition were selected from more than 10,000 taken in and around Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming, Dali and the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.
Documentary photographs can be sources of data and artistic forms, Hicks says. In addition, they are, inevitably, interpretations — reflections of an evaluation made by the photographer. There is a central struggle between the desire to simply record in an objective, self-explanatory way, and the photographer’s particular point of view regarding the experience — ultimately affected the images, Hicks says in her artist’s statement.
“There was, and continues to be a very real tension in the thought process that lies behind my role as a documentary photographer and the images I take as I travel in China,” Hicks says.