The great hall of China pictures

AHMEDABAD: It's a 1.6 X 1.4m frame. Though a photograph, it gives you a sense of having a look at an impressionist painting. The medals, sash and cap reveal slowly from a blurr of deep green. And then, the realization that 'the police man before the Tian'anne gate', has no individual identity before the state sends a chill down your spine! Ma Kang is among the six politically-charged photographers exhibiting at 'Chinese Photography Now', one of the two photography exhibitions organized by Tasveer at the NID gallery.Being one of world's oldest civilizations, China, like many world cultures, too confronts debates of tradition versus modernity. All the photo-art works, subtly or explicitly, explore this territory. The lingering question being - is tradition already a memory with no room in this sea of global values and ever-expanding landscapes? Be it Chu Chu's sculptural images of everyday objects, Liu Yue's expressions through 'quilt', 'flower' and 'Chinese landscape' or Luo Yongjin's architectural collages which are metaphors of contemporary China, the works explore the "relationship between a rapid economic and technological expansion and deep cultural value system".With Yan Xinfa haunting landscapes of ancient villages of central China and Yang Yongliang's scenery made with photo montages of a metropolis among others, the exhibition also indicates that photography is a much explored and popular medium in China.The second exhibition 'Photos for Rato' is about nostalgia as well as new beginnings. The photographs by Nikki Vreeland captures the landscape of Rato Dratsang- a Tibetan monastery in Karnataka. Built in a Tibetan refugee settlement, by few Rato monks who escaped to India after the Chinese invasion, the monastery is dedicated to the study of Buddhist logic. Vreeland who lived at this monastery as a monk for many years, has documented the daily lives of the monks learning, dining, meditating. The 'Monks cleaning the wheels of dharma', 'Rimpoche and his tutor', 'Monks preparing for dinner' - are beautiful but displaced.The exhibition is a fund raiser for the new monastic campus designed by a Delhi based architect Pradeep Sachdeva. Both the exhibitions are on display till April 14.