Cartier-Bresson's shots tell ten years of China's history at MUDEC

The MUDEC - Museum of Cultures in Milan welcomes from February 18 to July 3, 2022 the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson. China 1948-49 /1958, realized thanks to the collaboration of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. The exhibition brings together more than one hundred original prints as well as period magazine publications, documents and letters from the HCB Foundation’s collection: an extraordinary body of photographs and archival documents by the famous French photojournalist. The works and documents on display aim to recount two fundamental moments in China’s history: the fall of the Kuomintang and theestablishment of the communist regime (1948-1949) and Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958).

The celebrated photographer first highlights through his lens the most significant themes of change in contemporary Chinese history, also showing the Western world aspects kept hidden by regime propaganda, such as the exploitation of human resources and theomnipresence of militias.

It was November 25, 1948 when Life magazine commissioned Henri Cartier-Bresson to report on the last days of Beijing before the arrival of Mao’s troops. The planned two-week stay will last ten months, mostly in the Shanghai area. Cartier-Bresson would document the fall of Nanjing, ruled by the Kuomintang, and would later find himself forced to stay for four months in Communist Party-controlled Shanghai, finally leaving China just days before the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (Oct. 1, 1949).

The use of black and white in his photographs allows Cartier-Bresson to highlight the form and substance of reality and the veracity of the decisive instant. Each of his shots is capable of capturing the contemporaneity of things and facts.

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Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson, China Welfare, charity work of Madame Sun Yat-sen: children wait for rice distribution (Shanghai, March 1949) © Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos

Cartier-Bresson's shots tell ten years of China's history at MUDEC

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