“Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, ”
an exhibition of photography.

Opening Reception: Sat, Oct 16 · 6pm – 9pm

Location: Gallery 825
825 North La Cienega, Los Angeles, CA 90069

The title, a Western mistranslation of the Chinese poem “Let a Hundred flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend,” presents irreverent and implausible connections to explore anxieties of power, national identity, and interculturalism. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s Hundred Flowers Movement, encouraging… a variety of views in the “arts and sciences”, is best remembered in the West as alleged deliberate attempts to flush out free thinkers, intellectuals and artists, before hunting them down.

In this set of farcical, sternly staged photographs, Americans, both artists and academics, pose as soldiers, yet remain sentimental, vulnerable and unformed. In a time when globalism looms large and other more insidious invasions, both economic and cultural, is imminent, these photographs take cues from Anselm’s Kiefer’s series of works of the same name, meditations of renewal as a function of the destruction of symbol and myth.

LAAA/Gallery 825, 825 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069
P 310.652.8272  F 310.652.9251  gallery825@laaa.org
Tuesday through Saturday 10a to 5p