Ni Weihua’s photo series on Development is the Most Important Principle and Build a Harmonious Society bring about a “crisis of definition” when viewed from different ontological and epistemological perspectives. Are these photos an example of traditional documentary, post-documentary, or contemporary documentary? At a single glance, the two photo series of Ni Weihua aim at realistically documenting advertisement boards with the slogans ‘Development is the Most Important Principle’ or ‘Build a Harmonious Society’, as well as capturing the character of the environment and people surround them. However, documenting is not entirely equivalent to traditional documentary photography, as the element of documentation has been reconstituted in the contemporary documentary and becomes a component of the new artistic composition. In other words, concepts like spontaneity and temporal narrative associated with traditional documentary are no longer considered as the principal criteria for assessing the value of a photograph. It is clear that Ni Weihua’s photographic works could hardly be regarded as “correct” if judged by traditional standards, yet, it is this very idea of “incorrectiveness” that invigorated contemporary photography.   

As contemporary arts make extensive use of concrete images and postures, Ni Weihua’s conceptual art also deploys the use of documenting techniques. Here I would like to call this kind of conceptive documentary as contemporary documentary. And because it targets at specific ideas and concrete social contexts, it also belongs to the realm of what I defined as “critical art”. Certainly, to argue which name is more accurate runs the risk of dogmatism, for the nature of naming is determined eventually in the process of communication, not in its unquestionable and inevitable essence. Abstract Expressionism, for instance, is also known as the “American-type Painting” (Greenberg), or the “Action Painting”, while different names do not affect the description of an artistic event. Similarly, the classification of art must be determined by the nuances concerning the topic, rather than established dogmatic definitions. We should always re-categorize art based on the need and objective of our criticism. Indeed, there is no irrevocable, textbook-like way to name and classify art.    

Beginning with the establishment of the “Linear Cities Group” by Ni Weihua and Wang Jiahao in 1997, the two artists started to use data, writings, images and performances to express their artistic commentary on a series of social phenomena. In 1998, Ni Weihua used his camera lenses to record government’s propaganda boards that carried the popular slogan during the time – ‘Development is the Most Important Principle’. When I was curating an exhibition called “Individual and Society in Art” for the Guangdong Museum of Art in 2000, the mainstream audiences’ reading and interpretation of Ni’s photographs have been mainly influenced by the following two aspects: the traditional documentary photographic system that emphasizes documentation on the one hand, and the popularity of staged photography or the so-called contemporary photographic system on the other. The inclusion of Ni Weihua’s photo series in the exhibition reflected my attempt to discuss the meaning of photography beyond those two established photographic systems and to turn conceptive documentary into reality. 

In recent years, as those propaganda boards with ‘Development is the Most Important Principle’ has gradually disappeared, they were replaced by a new slogan ‘Build a Harmonious Society’. Once again, Ni Weihua took his camera and recorded these advertisements like he did ten years ago. The change of slogan keywords in ten years manifested profound strategic reorientation in government ideologies and public administration. The comments I made on Ni’s photo series Development is the most important Principle was that “we are forced to move forward by the words of development”; and now, my comments on Build a Harmonious Society become “we are limited by the words of harmony”. However, the question remains as to what keyword will come after development and harmony. What relationship does it have with the constitution of our public life? “Keywords – Ni Weihua’s Development and Harmony” embodies the artist’s critical interrogation of the national ideologies.