In his own words, photographer Yang Hui (杨麾) “was born in the middle reaches of the Jialing River in Nanchong. At eight I began to come and go between the countryside and city, at the school in an old ancestral hall where my mother taught or in an old temple. During the years of the Great Leap Forward [1958-9] I almost always went with my mother to the edge of the field to ‘checkup’ on the villagers to see if they’d dug [furrows] deeply enough.” The Jialing is one of Sichuan’s major rivers and helps make Sichuan one of the most fertile and densely populated places in China. “I became a photographer and really liked the people, I shot black and white film with a 35 mm camera in this really interesting place. The experiences I went through were unforgettably engraved on my heart. Over these some dozen years, I used photography’s recording function to bring a comprehension of life, to bring the way northern Sichuan’s people give to another when both are short, their unaffected friendships, equality, sincerity, unity of body and mind. I used the lens to throw all the passion I feel towards my fellow north Sichuan villagers.” When he took them, Yang Hui’s photographs probably didn’t seem especially unique, just everyday life in rural China. But his familiarity with those little corners and transfer points of rural life, his willingness to get muddy and wet with the other villagers, the comfort his subjects had with a man and his camera, his selection of places and time, and more than anything his belonging in this community, to this muddy place, village squares, docks, wharves and city markets underline the way he’s “writing what you know” in these photographs and make them that great art that shows the history of a unique time.

Yang Hui’s photographs document a period of change for villagers in rural Sichuan. Transportation was for the most part primitive, and as surprising as it might be looking at muddy roads, docks and simple markets, it had already improved a great deal over the poverty-struck conditions of the seventies and stood on the brink of the great changes of the late nineties and twenty-first century. Transportation and markets themselves were new: one river boat became 20, motorcycles appeared and then abounded, roads were improved, the chaos and opportunity of development was everywhere, motorcycles, trucks and the contract system had already transformed the countryside; reforms that allowed trade and markets had already reached deeply into country life.

Those are the broad strokes, the stuff you read in the papers. But Yang catches the ways that people lived in that, the man selling a couple of fish in a tank made out of plastic bags, an old fellow setting his watch by the wall clock hung in a box on a pole on the wharf or another who enjoys a close shave while mothers wait for the barber to shave their boys heads. Girls selling fruit, selling balloons, selling panties: not international trade, just the beginnings of a simple market economy. The dates of the photos mark the increasing pace of development, from the picture of a few women selling oranges in front of a dilapidated bank in the mid eighties to the ferry boat owners crying aboard customers in the nineties. In one photo, three women collect fares for a ferry that their families manage under the “contract system” established to give local people an economic interest in the economic expansion. The contract for management of the ferry was probably too expensive for one family, so three have cooperated and sent the young wives of each family’s sons (who are more than likely working construction for wages) to collect fares. Chinese people see this in a glance in Yang’s photo: he tells the whole story in that terse, simple composition. In the most recent pictures you can see rural government at work: a leader hurrying to the dais at a big “on the spot” meeting, or by contrast people gathered in front of a remote village’s unrenovated offices to greet visiting officials and, one of my favorites, the three-martini lunch, Sichuan-style with cadres downing shots of sorghum liquor after a meal, an important and time-tried way to establish friendships and contacts among officials from different levels, offices and regions.

The muddy roads in the photos are four lanes now, mechanized equipment has replaced the hand labor of the eighties and nineties, people no longer travel from village to town to cut hair or sell things on a blanket. The humanity and love Yang Hui brings to his portraits of Nanchong villagers stands foremost, and the openness in their faces reflects the understanding and sympathy with which he approaches them. The exhibition captures a time and a place in the not very distant past that has already vanished almost completely, and people’s sometimes inexplicable nostalgia for that time come clear in just those qualities that Yang Hui captured in his photographs.

Yang Hui’s Chinese language webpage is here.

These photos are from an exhibition of Yang Hui’s prints that was mounted at the Sichuan Gallery of Fine Arts in Chengdu in November of 2017. These are intended for educational use only. Please respect the artist’s rights to his work.

The captions are my translations of Yang Hui’s captions, in some cases edited to catch the sense of his colloquial Chinese.