Art review: Rural Chinese life enchants in a photographic master’s work

Bottom line: A sentimental view of the charms of Chinese village life doesn’t detract from the appeal of Zeng Yi’s black-and-white images.

How much do you need to be happy? It’s a question many Americans seem to be contemplating, as they engage in epic downsizing, build modest, tiny houses and reshift attitudes about wealth, possessions and their links to happiness.

The angelic, wrinkled faces of the farmers, peddlers, fishermen and basket weavers featured in celebrated Chinese photographer Zeng Yi’s exhibition “The People’s China: Village Life by Master Photographer Zeng Yi” at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum suggest that being content can be about more than just the material objects that surround you.

The more than 50 black-and-white photos taken from the 1960s until the mid-2000s show Chinese villagers whose way of life has remained seemingly unchanged. Even in the 21st century, rural China, as seen through Zeng’s lens, can look remarkably ancient.

Focusing primarily on the residents of Shandong province, Zeng gravitates toward portraiture, homing in on WWII veterans, elderly couples whose marriages were arranged decades ago, a husband caring for his ailing wife, or a gaggle of seven women in the photograph “When We Were Young” with tiny bound feet, wearing identical workers jackets and hats, the village beauties reunited in old age. It’s a closed world where a missed bus signals a devastating disaster, puppeteers ply their ancient art in rural hamlets and trained birds help fishermen in wooden boats pull in their catch.

Zeng’s vision of contemporary China is devoid of the incessant advertising, televisions, technology, cars and frenzied pace that define our own world. Beyond the occasional electric fan or small, dorm-sized refrigerator, there are few emblems of contemporary consumer life.

The photographer is enamored with the expressiveness of his subjects’ eyes and the decades of experience they wear like a chest of war medals on their faces. In a society that honors rather than denigrates old age, Zeng conveys a reverence for what these men and women have endured.

But in addition to his clear enchantment with these weathered faces, Zeng also celebrates context and focuses in on the character of their material surroundings: sparsely furnished stone dwellings with dirt floors, and people whose meager possessions like umbrellas and plastic shopping bags are hung on nails on the wall where Americans would hang flat screens.

Bare electric bulbs illuminate the entrance to their simple, sparse one-room dwellings, which suggest lives lived in the same way for generations. Captions attest to life’s simple pleasures: tea, a pipe, steamed buns and bicycles as transportation even into old age.

The tiny, rural Chinese villages like the ones Zeng documents are often dominated by the elderly, younger generations having fled for the city long ago. But even images of children astound with their timelessness. Despite being shot in 1982, in “Our Classroom,” small children seated at low wooden benches write their lessons in chalk on thick slate tablets in lieu of pencil and paper.

We have only Zeng’s images and attendant captions to go by, but these people appear at blissful peace with their circumstances. There is a subtle gloss of propaganda that might explain why Zeng is so revered in his country for his idealized vision of the simplicity and joys of village existence. Is all really as peaceful and are these people as content as they appear? Or is some of Zeng’s romance for this way of life informing his perspective? But the feeling that a heavy dose of sentimentality informs these photographs doesn’t detract from the pull they exert, in their depiction of a world so utterly different from the one we live in.