Photography of Activism, Exile, and Espionage: Gu Shuxing in 1930s–40s U.S.

Gu Shuxing (1897–1968) was an intellectual woman who wielded a camera “hidden” behind her husband, Chen Hansheng (1897–2004), an internationally eminent Chinese social scientist and activist. Consequently, despite being recognized as an outstanding early Chinese female photographer, Gu’s photographic practice remains deeply under-researched. Working closely with her husband, Gu was also an educator, a political activist, and an underground Communist spy. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study suggests that Gu’s photography—produced during her continuous travels and exiles across China, Russia, Japan, the United States, Hong Kong, and India from the late 1920s to 1950—represents a nuanced global history of the twentieth century.

This lecture focuses on Gu’s photographs of working-class Americans captured during her exiles in New York in the late 1930s and late 1940s. It examines her underlying concepts, artistic interactions, and the global political and social contexts of her works, demonstrating how Gu transformed herself from an amateur photographer into a professional photojournalist within a multilingual and transcultural milieu. Through a visual analysis of her photographs alongside the traces of Chinese networks in the United States, this study argues that Gu consciously distanced her work from the pictorialism flourishing in 1930s China; instead, she engaged with the Photo League, a New York-based leftist camera club and photography school, adopting social realism through a radical lens. It also explores how her work interacted with wartime Chinese photography during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In addition, it investigates the enigmatic connections between her photographic practice and the international espionage networks in which she was entangled. 

Bio
Dr. Yizhou Wang is an Assistant Professor in Chinese Art and Culture at Hong Kong Chu Hai College. She is also a Mercator Fellow at the University of Münster. She obtained her PhD in East Asian Art History from Heidelberg University. Her current research project focuses on the global photographic practice of Gu Shuxing, an under-researched Chinese female photographer, intellectual, and Communist spy. Previously, she served as a Research Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, and lectured at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was also a research associate at Kyoto University and a visiting fellow at the University of Tokyo. She has published journal articles and book chapters on Chinese courtesan arts, early East Asian photography, plant humanities, and Sino-Japanese/Korean artistic interactions. She has also curated contemporary art exhibitions in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shenzhen.