Some 601 photos in an ongoing exhibition at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) offer the viewers a chance to experience the lives of the ordinary Chinese over the past half a century.

The exhibition is entitled "Humanism in China: Documentary Photography in Contemporary China."

"It is the first time for so many photographs so true to the reality of the lives of ordinary Chinese to be exhibited at a national gallery," said Feng Yuan, newly-appointed director of the museum.

"It is the first time that humans, instead of the era and politics, have been made the indisputable focus of Chinese documentary photography," said Yan Wendou, renowned photographer.

Critics welcomed the show.

"It is the first time that major Chinese art institutions have collected works by Chinese photographers," said Wang Huangsheng, director of the Guangdong Museum of Art, which launched the collection of photos two years ago.

"It is the debut showing of more than 500 documentary photos that have never been published by major Chinese media outlets," said photographer An Ge.

Over the past two years, Wang, An, and Hu Wugong, all photographers with Xi'an-based Sanqin Metropolitan News, have visited more than 1,000 amateur and professional photographers around the country.

They once paid 500 yuan (US$60) for a photograph. From the 100,000 photographs the three collected, they chose 601 and curated the exhibition.

The 601 photos, which document the lives, desires and struggles of ordinary Chinese over the past 50 years, mostly of the common people, made a great stir when exhibited at the Guangdong Museum of Art and then at the Shanghai Museum of Art earlier this year.

Nine of them, which were "too cruel and sensitive," are not included in the Beijing exhibition, said director Feng.

The Beijing show at NAMOC will run until July 10.

It's divided into four parts, titled "Life," "Relations," "Desires" and "Time."

One of the photographs is of young men and women dancing "Zhongzi Wu," a group dance, to show their loyalty to Chairman Mao during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). The eyes of the youths glitter with passion, frenzy and determination.

Another shows a young woman prisoner who is about to be executed combing her long hair carefully.

"The photographs totally enthralled me. They are so close to the life of ordinary people like myself. I was shocked by the changes in society and in my own life over the past 50 years, and kept saying to myself, 'Ah-ha! I used to be like that,"' said Wang Yuguo, a visitor at the exhibition who was born in 1949.

A government official in the 1960s is shown pulling a cart filled with honeycomb briquettes, which had just been distributed to him by his danwei (work unit).

Women workers in a Beijing textile factory are shown breast-feeding their babies during a work break in the 1970s.

Young women workers in a rural factory in North China's Hebei Province are caught standing at the gate of the small factory, gazing at the outside world during a rest break in the 1980s.

Another photo documents the lives of residents in a small village in Central China's Henan Province, that has since been struck by AIDS.

A lighter moment is offered by a photograph depicting three plump-faced children sleepily yawning while riding home on a donkey in Ansai on the Loess Plateau in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, in 1987.

Curators of the exhibition intentionally avoided photos that the public were already familiar with, like "Big Eyes" by Xie Hailong, which shows a village girl looking forward to going to school.

But they include representative works of some of the country's best documentary photographers.

"Bicycles" by Wang Wenlan, a photographer with China Daily in Beijing, captures the flowing river of bicycles in the nation's capital. The exhibition as a whole impressively demonstrates the collective strength of the ordinary.

The atmosphere was special at the opening ceremony of the Beijing showing.

"I attend more than 10 opening ceremonies of exhibitions each week at this time of the year, but I have never seen one like this -- everyone here has been touched by what they have seen," said Lu Yanxia, an art editor with Beijing Daily.

The sensational show captures the charisma of documentary photography, but it also is a reminder that there have been too few photo exhibitions like this, in which "the Chinese record lives of ordinary Chinese and the ups and downs of Chinese society," said curator An.

"Chinese photography has never before presented a systematic record of the lives of ordinary Chinese. With photography, before the 1980s men were only decorations of the era in which they lived or stage props in the drama of politics.

After the 1980s Chinese documentary photography gradually turned to capturing a true record of the society, but it had no clear orientation," said photographer Yan.

"We searched everywhere for a photograph showing the natural disaster in the country in 1962, when thousands of people starved to death in Henan, and for one recording the tragic Sanmenxia flood in Henan in the 1960s, but we found none," said curator Hu.

Hu said they were lucky to be able to show to the public for the first time photographs of common people in the Tangshan earthquake, in North China's Hebei Province in 1976 and in the Zhumadian flood in Henan Province in 1981.

The three curators all believe that the very best documentary photos recording Chinese history are still tucked away gathering dust in the homes of ordinary Chinese people.

"It wrenches the heart to think of the neglect and loss," said An.

(Xinhua News Agency June 23, 2004)