Thomas Ruff. Tableaux Chinois (Hardcover)

Dieter Roelstraete

ISBN 10: 3753301760 / ISBN 13: 9783753301761

Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2022

About this Item

Hardcover. For his "Tableaux chinois" series, Thomas Ruff digitally edited Chinese propaganda images from between 1950 and 1970. The Chinese Communist Party published these images in "La Chine", a magazine distributed in various languages around the world. Now presented in a large-format photobook, Ruff's work links the original analogue offset printing grid with the digital pixel structure. In doing so, the artist transports the 20th century propaganda images into the visual language of the 21st century. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9783753301761

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Thomas Ruff. Tableaux Chinois (Hardcover)
• Publisher: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3753301760
• ISBN 13: 9783753301761
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

An ingenious photographic analysis of Chinese propaganda across two photo technologies

In the early 2000s, Thomas Ruff (born 1958) chanced across a coffee-table propaganda book on Mao Zedong and became interested in the visual rhetoric of Chinese Communism, eventually purchasing copies of La Chine―the French iteration of a periodical that the Chinese Communist Party produced from the late 1950s through the 1970s as a means of demonstrating the advantages of Communism to European countries.
Ruff scanned images from La Chine depicting cheerful soldiers, scenic views, ceremonial occasions and Mao himself, enlarging them to reveal the offset halftone dots, then duplicating the image and converting it into pixels; that image was then layered over the original scan, from which Ruff removed various areas. The final image therefore contains both analog halftone and digital pixel. As Susanne Holschbach observes, “Ruff has visually merged the technological process of preparing photographs for their mass distribution from the two photographic eras on one pictorial plane.”