Photography has incessantly influenced the art of painting since its birth at the beginning of 20th century.  Photography provided not only the real structure of images and life –like portrayal of reality, but also it became a source of spiritual experience and the object of its expression.

The paintings of  Cao Xiaodong and Xie Hongjun have this meaning:  historical pictures became the centre of their paintings not because they are nostalgic of old times or they simply want to reproduce the sense of reality typical of photography. For them, the photografic picture is a means to rivisit a historical scene, revive a forgotten past or confer it a new visual meaning. They borrow deeply from the private and public iconography of the period of Republic of China onward, making the photographic pictures the object of a new visual interpretation.

Cao Xiaodong manipulates old photos from the Republic of China, transformed with spots and speckles to give the impression of daguerreotyped antiquity,  sometimes he inserts himself inside the picture becoming an imaginary member of the historical scene.Xie Hongjun depicts public scene pictures drawn from the troubled age of Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, peoples caught in the eighties’ transformation from comunism to capitalism, using the propaganda thick tones of that period.

So in the end they do not use photography to describe history, but decribes photography in its relationship with history.

- ZHU Qi, 7 June 2011 written at 798 Art Zone