The Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies Gallery is hosting an exhibit titled “Faces of China, 1981” through Dec. 6.During the show’s opening on Sept. 11, Patrick Dowdey, curator of the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies Gallery, introduced the photographer, Tom Zetterstrom.
Photographer Tom Zetterstrom spoke about his images, which offer a glimpse of China’s people in only the third year of Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening Up.” They were taken before globalization or discos, before cell phones, during Zetterstrom’s 1981 trip hosted by the Yale-China Association.The photographs were exhibited at the Asia Society and toured nationally in the 1980s, but have not been displayed for 30 years. The people in these color and black-and-white portraits are guileless, everyday people who stand on the brink of enormous social change.The Freeman Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday and is free of admission. (Photos by Hannah Norman ’16)
Olivia Drake
Mike Mavredakis
Jeff Harder