Agnès Varda (born in 1928 in Belgium) studied photography at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as well as History of Art at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. Well-known as a one of the talented directors from the New Wave – a group of French film-makers of the late 1950s-60s - Agnès Varda is also an accomplished photographer. In 1957, while China was still almost entirely closed to foreigners, Agnès Varda was invited by the Chinese Government and embarked on a two-months journey from North to South China with a delegation of French dignitaries.
She visited several cities such as Chongqing, Shanghai, crossed the Yangtze river, while taking a rich harvest of black and white and colour pictures. At that time Agnès Varda knew very little about China, hence her photographs might be interpreted as a straightforward and inner response to her experience of the Middle Kingdom. Through these rare series of images, she achieved to capture the multifarious forms of popular entertainment and glimpse of everyday life among Chinese people. She waited until 2012 before showing her personal vision of China during a major exhibition held in the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing.
