Art review: Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography

HUMANISM IN CHINA: A CONTEMPORARY RECORD OF PHOTOGRAPHY
*****

CITY ART CENTRE, GLASGOW

DICKENS opens his last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a description of two people in a rowing boat scavenging on the filthy Thames in the foggy dark, the polluted artery flowing through a corrupted city. Thereafter, the plot revolves around the ownership of an enormous rubbish heap and the poisoned wealth that it generates, continuing the theme of scavenging, dirt and dereliction established in that memorable opening scene.

Though Our Mutual Friend was published more than 140 years ago, Dickens's chosen imagery remains a fiercely apposite metaphor for a capitalist economy in its raw, unameliorated state. Dickens intended that, certainly. Written a dozen years earlier, in an equally graphic image, polluted fog also pervades the opening scene of Bleak House. That too is a metaphor. In that case one for the obfuscation of the law, but both these memorable opening scenes are also actually descriptive of the city at the time and reflected closely the harsh reality of an expanding industrial economy. In Our Mutual Friend, the central metaphor encapsulates a society where there were at the same time great wealth, great poverty and great pollution and where, almost literally, those who had nothing at the extreme edges of society had to survive on what was thrown away by those who had more than they could consume at its wealthy heart.

We may think all that was long ago, but the graphic images of Dickens's novel were forcibly brought back to me by an extraordinary collection of several hundred documentary photographs of contemporary China on show in Edinburgh City Art Centre.

The title is Humanism in China: a Contemporary Record of Photography. It is in fact a remarkable, warts and all portrait of the people, or peoples – for the subject matter ranges across the whole range of China's diverse population – of an extraordinary country, but it is not the place made familiar by tourist images of the Great Wall or the Forbidden City. Rather it is a place where there is much that Dickens would have found familiar, even if it is on a scale that even he could hardly have imagined.

Here are images of dense polluted fog, and indeed of blinding sandstorms, of poisoned rivers and of people surviving by scavenging from rubbish heaps exactly as Dickens describes. Indeed not only are there people queuing up for the privilege of scavenging, there are pictures of people pulling fake designer goods from the fire to which they have officially been consigned to be destroyed, or, in an image that he would surely have turned into telling metaphor, people fishing with improvised rods over a high wall topped with a barbed wire fence. Exactly what they are fishing for it is not quite clear. The enigmatic title in the catalogue, "A scene before the drug forbidden education base," suggests that it is drugs and on the wall the label mentions detoxification.

As in this picture, some of the labelling is unclear. It also often changes between the catalogue and the label on the wall. One picture of what seems to be an innocuous scene of a gathering of young women is identified as a scene in a women's prison a little ambiguously in the catalogue, but on the wall its title is blunt: "Female prisoners hoping to have their death sentence repealed".

The images throughout are truly graphic, though not always so glum. Indeed there is plenty of humour. Sometimes it is a little cruel. A man has loaded his motorbike with live ducks so heavily that he has overbalanced, disappearing beneath his quacking cargo.

Sometimes this humour is surreal. Elegant models do an impromptu catwalk performance for an audience seated on haystacks, or, inexplicably a near-naked and rather beautiful girl is demonstrating elaborate body painting to a rustic crowd at Lake Fuxian. Nearest to her, and to us, is an old peasant in traditional costume and with a weatherbeaten face. His expression says it all. They may be in physical proximity, but there is a planetary distance between the worlds of the model and the peasant. The distance is just as great, too, between a group of villagers in a remote and primitive village and a car stuck in the mud. There the two realities are so remote that it has not occurred to anybody to offer help.

There is innocence. A child playing with a hula hoop in the street, for instance, and there is tragedy too. A man at a gold mine cradles a dying relative. A cadre beats up an old man in a village. A picture of young women weeping and reaching desperately out of the barred windows of a bus is described enigmatically as, "Undesired intruders are expelled from the city with force." What was their crime? The frankness of such images is often startling. They date from the present back to the Cultural Revolution. There are even pictures of urban cadres undergoing "retraining" in the countryside.

The exhibition is organised loosely around four very broad themes: Existence, Relationship, Desire and Time. Existence can be pretty tough. There are the scavengers mentioned earlier and other images of people scraping a living in the face of all sorts of difficulty and hardship, of children sitting their exams in the open for lack of classrooms; or others going to school who have to cross a rope bridge over a deep river that has lost most of its footway and now consists of no more than three bare ropes. In the summer, town dwellers go to sleep in a subway tunnel to escape the heat.

Relationship includes occasional lovers, a couple gazing into the smog shrouding the skyscrapers of Shanghai, for instance, but it also ranges from relationships with nature, those sandstorm pictures, to relationships with God. An unexpected image is a woman praying in a Gothic church for her sick child, but even more unexpectedly Desire includes a group of nuns attending the funeral of a bishop.

The confrontation between the glamorous painted model and the old man appropriately comes under Time and sometimes we feel that distance too. It is like looking back to Dickens' world, or even further. One extraordinary photograph has the wordy title: "Visually impaired people who earn money by playing the Shanbei Dao walk with difficulty in Yellow Earth Altiplano." It mirrors a painting by Brueghel of blind beggars, also musicians, illustrating the proverb "when the blind lead the blind". In the photo a group of blind musicians are walking across a desolate landscape holding onto each other in line exactly as in Brueghel's picture. It is the same scene, but lived, not imagined.

There are people in huge crowds peacefully watching some spectacle, or pushing frantically for jobs, or for lottery tickets and bicycles pouring through a wide street like the Yangtse in flood. You get a sense of the scale of China from such images, but from the whole exhibition, too, you see in all the Dickensian imagery how it is a place in dramatic transition with the apparently timeless and unchanged knocking up against the ultramodern.

The exhibition includes the work of 248 photographers selected from more than 1000 and more than 500 photographs selected from 100,000. The wider theme of the exhibition according to the catalogue is "Humanized China – Individualised China". Clearly then, it is intended to express the political idea of liberating individual enterprise that is driving change in China. But there is a lot of desperation in these pictures. These changes are hard, but as it was in 19th century Britain, that desperation is the savage driver of economic success.

• Until 14 September.