Snapshots of China focus on its culture

China: A photographic portrait ****
City Art Centre

PERHAPS surprisingly, photography is only just being recognised as a fine art by China's museums. Considering that the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou had more than 100,000 pieces by more than 1000 Chinese photographers from which to chose the staggering 590 currently on display at the City Art Centre, it's safe to say that photography in China has finally arrived on the cultural map.

Around 250 photographers are represented in an astounding exhibition which not only illustrates the growth of the medium, it also chronicles the cultural and personal development of the Chinese people in the last 50 years. On this, the Scottish leg of it's tour, 11 films are also shown, each of which further explores the cultural development of the country and its people.

Standing on any of the three floors taken up by the sprawling panoply of colour and black and white images might seem daunting at first, but the images themselves are inviting and deeply involving.

The photographs feature, among many other things, the military, the contrasts between city and village, changing fashions, methods of travel, at work, home and play, weddings, divorces and funerals – as incisive and authoritative as any collection in the developed west might hope for.

They chart the progress of the Chinese people in the latter half of the last century and beyond, and several things become immediately apparent. For all the cultural differences between China and Britain, there are remarkable similarities. How Chinese parents relate to their children; how unemployed workers feel; how Chinese children play.

There are differences of course. Photographs of women standing around looking sullen and forlorn might seem innocuous enough, until you read the caption: Female Prisoner On Death Row Hoping To Change Her Sentence.

The industry and inventiveness of impoverished tradesmen is on display, as a 'folk calligraphy artist' waits to be employed while sitting in front of a wall of his work. Chinese heartstrings are tugged in the same way too, as shown in a photograph of a soldier bidding farewell to his visiting family, or in the face of a widow carrying a picture of his late wife on a long promised visit to Beijing.

The look of sheer contentment on the happy face of a child in a street with a hula hoop in Beijing speaks volumes – a scene which could be happening anywhere in the world. Some scenes would not transfer so easily though. A farmer being maltreated by a village cadre, women picking coal by hand, school children having to go to school by crossing a broken, threadbare rope bridge – a task Indiana Jones might think twice about.

One of the more remarkable things about the exhibition is that, despite the overwhelming number of photographs, they still leave a sense of wanting to see more. Though not presented chronologically, it's difficult to avoid the sense of growth they convey.

The world may be shrinking in some ways, but clearly, the more of it that is revealed through fascinating exhibitions like this, the more of it there seems to be to discover.

• Runs until September 14