Newman Huo

    IN the moonlight, a naked woman is crawling on the roof of a shabby traditional Chinese house in a courtyard in Beijing while clouds are slowly moving across the sky.

    This is what the young Chinese photographer Lu Yanpeng has tried to capture with his lens in a series of four photographs titled “Moonlight.”

    “In my photos, the crawling naked girl may draw the attention of audiences, but I just focus on the moving clouds,” Lu said.

    Born in Fujian Province in 1984, Lu is currently working and living in Beijing as a freelance photographer.

    Lu is among the 20 young Chinese photographers who are displaying their works at the photography exhibition, “Recurrent Shadows — Selected Works from Three Shadows Photography Awards 2008-2011” in He Xiangning Art Museum through July 31.

    The group exhibition features more than 300 prize-winning works by those 20 photographers who participated in the annual competition organized by the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Beijing from 2008 through this year.

    “This is a group exhibition of young photographers who were all born in the 1980s, and their derailed, out-of-the-closet, rebellious, indulgent, and marginalized life experiences form the primary subject matter of this exhibition,” said the curator Feng Boyi.

    “Nowadays, China is bringing us on a directionless journey of modernization, causing everything to change quickly and become complicated and confusing,” Feng said.

    “These photographers’ works cannot be defined, because they are only extremes, and through them nothing specific is communicated,” he said.

    “They emphasize the quest for meaning in such uncertain times,” he said.

    The majority of the participating artists did not study photography, but they all currently use photography as a mode of self-expression.

    Many of the exhibited works focus on the photographers’ own lives, and appear on the surface not to be grand social narratives.

    To a certain degree, these photographers break with the Western art world’s unilateral understanding of the socio-political motivations of contemporary Chinese photography.

    The Three Shadows Photography Art Center was established as a non-profit art organization in Beijing by Chinese photographer Rong Rong and his Japanese wife Inri.

    Dates: Through July 31

    Hours: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Closed Monday

    Add: He Xiangning Art Museum, Overseas Chinese Town, Shennan Boulevard, Nanshan District （南山区华侨城何香凝美术馆）

    Buses: 21, 26, 32, 54, 59, 101, 105, 109, 121, 204, 209, 223, 234, 327, 328, 350, 370, 390

    Metro: OCT Station (华侨城站), Exit C