Prior to sealing their collaboration, RongRong was working in Beijing and inri in Tokyo, each engaged with action and performance in their respective practices. inri came to photography via Ken Domon’s photobook Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples (1963). She studied the medium in university and began her career in 1994 as a photojournalist, though she quickly felt the limitations of making studio portraits for a newspaper. Three years later, she went freelance and began investigating her interest in the human body. During this period, she came across the experimental dance company H Art Chaos and captured their lead dancer, Shirakawa Naoko, in a series of black-and-white gelatin silver prints (fig. 1). In the artist’s own words, that experience “catastrophically transformed my ideas on the value of photography as artistic expression.”¹ In the late 1990s, she produced another series—this time in color—of the singer-actor Bitō Momoko throwing red paint around a room and furiously maneuvering her body as she smeared her pent-up feelings on the walls, the floor, and herself (fig. 2).

In 1993 in China, RongRong, who had taken up the camera after being denied admission to the arts academy in his hometown, was taking photography classes at an art school in Beijing. He had moved to what would become Dongcun, or East Village, then a far-flung corner of the capital in which migrant workers and artists on the periphery of society could afford to live. There, he connected with a group of artists whom he pictured performing various actions that flaunted decorum. For instance, he photographed Fen-Ma Liuming (b. 1969, Hubei Province) serving an audience steamed fish for lunch while naked. The residents of Dongcun were determined to make a life out of their squalid surrounds. Though RongRong had only lived there a year when the police raided the village, his stark and tightly cropped images of the place and of his friends’ ephemeral experimentations became enduring representations and symbols of Chinese avant-garde art of the 1990s.

In 1999, when RongRong traveled to Japan to open an exhibition, inri saw a picture from his Wedding Gown series (fig. 3). She instantly recognized the profound loneliness in his work and wrote down what she saw in a few characters that she gave to him. Likewise, several days later, when inri showed RongRong some of her prints, he immediately understood that she was grappling with the same personal and aesthetic questions through photography and performance. When RongRong returned to Beijing, he repeatedly invited inri to visit. Feeling uncertain about how she would continue with photography, she took a risk and went. The weeks they spent taking casual pictures proved transformative for both, who had felt stagnant and discontented with their individual practices at the time. Finding their experience together to be exceptionally illuminating and regenerative, inri relocated to Beijing in 2002. Together, she and RongRong began to move in front of the camera at various landmarks, setting in motion a partnership (figs. 4–6).

Recognizing that the critical attention they were receiving was entirely from the Western art circuit, RongRong&inri wished to show their work to people in China. In the 2000s, with influxes of Western capital following a series of open-door economic reforms, spaces for contemporary art sprouted up in Beijing and other cities, but few exhibited lens-based works. This was the era of the point-and-shoot camera and the photo lab. Despite the growing presence of images in people’s lives, there were limited opportunities to discuss what they did or to consider aspirations for the future of image-making and its limitations. In fact, RongRong&inri worked against the common perception and misconception that the camera is truthful, that the images it produces are objective, and that photography is therefore not artistic.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, photography was situated in an awkward position both in China and abroad. Calligraphy, ink painting, oil painting, metalware, sculptures, and ceramics were the exhibiting and collecting focus of state art museums; with few exceptions, photographs were not included within the parameters of their holdings. Most viewers, whether accustomed to looking at art or not, did not know whether or how to approach photographic images with aesthetic inquiries—a result of the convergence of Chinese and Western artistic hierarchies. This stood in contrast to the very existence and missions of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (public, opened 1995) and Museum Hanmi, Seoul (private, opened 2003), not to mention other organizations in East Asia that were exhibiting lens-based work. RongRong recalled the conundrum in a 2018 interview: “When I saw the state of Chinese photography, there was no home for [it] and Chinese photographers. In the beginning, when I wanted to do exhibitions[,] . . . I realized that my earliest works really couldn’t be exhibited in China.”²

For major collecting institutions in the Western European and American circuits—key sites and audiences for East Asian art—Japanese photography from the 1950s–70s and select Chinese avant-garde works from the 1990s became representative of the region’s photo-history. If exhibitions on photography in China were sparse, publications on Chinese historical and contemporary photographic practices were lacking even more. For curators abroad who were in a position to exhibit and acquire photography, publications served as a primary source of knowledge acquisition and a means of engagement with scholars and artists based around the world. The lack of infrastructure to support discussions around lens-based activities happening in China would only grow more problematic beginning in 2010, as the increasingly widespread use of smartphones launched an explosion of images. On how they could interrupt the status quo as artists, RongRong said, “It is a matter of imagination.”³

inri and RongRong agreed that their next endeavor would be to create a space dedicated to photography. The design of the physical space, the experience such a place would offer, and the purposes it could serve first came out of the circulation of photobooks among their friends, who brought back titles that were then only available for sale abroad. In 2007, they opened the first photography museum in China, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Caochangdi, an arts district on the outskirts of Beijing. “The Centre is an extension of our career as artists, an experimental basis for the photographic medium,” inri explained of their ambition.⁴

The challenges of realizing the Centre were many. Opening a space for art is a project that typically calls for capital funding, which they lacked. So, the artists reached into their own savings. Fellow artist and early supporter Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) designed the building. Equipped with galleries, a library, a darkroom, and living space for artists in residence, the architecture models a new ethos of exhibiting art in China, one deliberately positioned as more approachable to audiences and artists outside the conventional fine arts circuit (figs. 7, 8). It also provides, in a single point of entry, access to all of these facilities, something that had not previously existed in China. In 2008, immediately after the Centre opened, the financial crisis hit. As surrounding galleries folded one after another, RongRong&inri worried that their newly operational facility would also be forced to close. In 2010, amid rapid and extensive overhauls of the capital, the Centre faced the threat of demolition, which the artists tactfully resisted. Even more astonishing is that for the first 10 years of its existence, admission was free. The public’s appetite for photography drove the artists to funnel profits from the sale of their own work to the museum through several periods of financial difficulty.⁵

In 2008, amid the financial crisis, RongRong&inri, taking an expansive understanding of identity, organized the Three Shadows Photography Award to seek out and foster contemporary Chinese and diasporic photographers. Acutely aware of the pulse of culture, they put out annual calls on the museum website and social media channels, meeting younger generations in the places where they access information and share their work. In addition to creating opportunities for emerging image-makers, RongRong&inri saw connecting other parts of the world to the Chinese contemporary art scene as a key mission of the Centre. They designed the artist-in-residence program in part to bring photographers from abroad to Beijing to develop work and expose domestic audiences to artistic currents elsewhere. They believe in the importance of facilitating in-person encounters and gatherings, a conviction that has only grown in importance. RongRong&inri’s efforts echo a global history and active practice of artists establishing spaces intended to show and further develop works by peers in the face of a deficit in reliable public and private support.

RongRong&inri’s 2012 work in MoMA’s collection, a selection of 16 prints from the series Tsumari Story, was made during a turning point in their joint career. Invited to participate in the 2012 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, the artists—at the time based in Beijing—went to central Japan, where they lived in an agricultural village for two years. They saw this as an opportunity for the two of them to return to photography and for the team they had cultivated to operate the Centre independently. They immersed themselves in the distinct seasons of the region and composed what would become Tsumari Story over 10–20 sessions.

Upon their arrival, the artists set out to perform a couple that had abandoned contemporary life, but in Tsumari, the environment sets the terms of living.⁶ The region is known for its intense snowfall, which shapes habits and alters foot traffic throughout the long winter. When the snow melts, it transforms into powerful currents that tumble into rivers. Water also takes the form of rice paddies, springs, fog, gorges, the coastline, and the humidity-laden air. Its abundance characterizes and sustains life in the region. The tension between nature’s inclinations and human settlement rises to the surface here. The terraced paddies of Tsumari are highly intervened. They form the basic units of satoyama, a particular configuration of land and people that is the result of centuries of forestry, irrigation, and settlement in mountainous terrains. The interior spaces are no less artificial. Due to severe population decline, uninhabited homes have become a common sight in Tsumari. One of them, Shedding House in the village of Tōge, was restored by the artist Kurakake Jun’ichi (b. 1967, Tokyo) and some 3,000 students from Nihon University College of Art at the 2006 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale as part of a larger effort to revitalize the region. Almost every wooden surface of the seemingly unfurnished house has been carved by hand. Slanted dashes cover the beams and window frames. A circle of linear indentations radiates from the center of the floorboards. This house sets the stage for Tsumari Story (2012–14), in which the two artists meditate on a way of existence at the mercy of nature, which they have come to realize circumvents human intervention.

This new experience of time and space struck the artists, who until then had been running the Centre full-time in a rapidly changing city. As inri reflected, “Humans are part of nature, not making nature. In nature, we felt compelled to examine the body and the relationship between our bodies.”⁷ In addition to young people leaving for larger cities, inhabitants of agricultural towns like Tōge have faced declining birthrates, which have altered the social fabric in palpable ways. In response to the villagers’ enthusiasm for the presence of their children, RongRong and inri invited their three sons to participate in their sessions. Seeing in them the vitality and resilience that they wished for their work to take on, the artists shifted the premise of their practice from one of performing human degeneracy to an origin story rooted in the local habitat and lore. In Shedding House, they move to meet each other again (figs. 9–16).

The story begins with a couple bowing to each other in an empty farmhouse, where they have taken shelter in the aftermath of a snowstorm. Clothing loosens from their bodies as they move around the house and out into the fields. In one moment, the woman collapses on the floor. In the next, the man suspends himself upside down from a supporting beam. When they take off their clothes, their bodies become indistinguishable. In the bathhouse and in the blizzard, they gaze at each other, never looking away. Three children come in and out of the pictures as the seasons change. They stare out of the windows when snow collects and run outside to the paddies come summer. A viewer familiar with the area would readily recognize the Echigo Mountains, which are visible on a clear day, as well as the famed Hoshitoge paddies, which are a stone’s throw from Shedding House.

In total, the series includes 75 gelatin silver prints, the artists’ preferred medium. The 16 images in MoMA’s collection are unique in their finish and dimensions. This crisp interpretation on 9-by-12-inch photo paper represents the earliest iteration of the series and was printed by the artists for gallerist Peter MacGill, their friend and supporter. In the process of making this version, RongRong&inri realized that the story was one they could share with the public as a discrete work. In successive iterations, they employed techniques that had become newly available to them that blur the image. The foggy surface re-creates and accentuates the atmosphere engendered by the air.⁸ Though they make up a series, the images in Tsumari Story are not fixed in a particular order, enabling viewers to arrange them as they like and opening them up to different possibilities. For the photobook format, the artists selected a picture of their children looking out of the house as the opening image, followed by images of the couple bowing to each other. In exhibition contexts, they have adapted the scale of the images relative to the space. For the 2012 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, for example, they combined multiple large-scale inkjet prints on pieces of fabric that were suspended from the ceiling of a former gymnasium. Each frame distills the artists’ entanglement with each other, their clothes, the house, the water in all its forms, and the village that welcomed them. Each presentation reinvents the story—its characters, their fates, and what the environment has to offer.

In 2015, RongRong and inri relocated their family to Kyoto and reoriented their practice to the new place, inspired by their experience in Tsumari. In this storied city, they continue to create opportunities for those who come after them. That same year, Three Shadows established a second location and launched the first edition of the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen—a coastal city important to the history of Chinese avant-garde art. The goal of this collaboration between Three Shadows and the Rencontres d’Arles is to showcase global contemporary photography to Chinese audiences and provide opportunities for emerging Chinese curators and artists. Though the Festival has become a major platform for artists and independent curators, its ability to draw or engage local audiences remains a challenge—as is the case for many other festivals and fairs.⁹ Three years after the pandemic began, RongRong&inri established a residence in Kyoto and named it Jifei-an (即非庵), taking from Buddhist-Taoist thinking that everything is at once distinct and simultaneously connected. The artists have framed this space as one for intimate gatherings and experimental creation, continuing to foreground relationships in a new world.

In examining the state of photography in China in 2026, there are now a number of spaces for presenting and thinking through photographic imagery. Since 2007, some state museums have begun collecting and exhibiting photographs for their sociohistorical and aesthetic value. As of 2026, there are three photography museums founded within the state-funded system.¹⁰ Also since 2007, many private contemporary art museums that exhibit lens-based works have opened across the country; the Shanghai Center of Photography (2015–23), now defunct, made photographic images the center of its programming—as has the Xie Zilong Photography Museum in Changsha (opened 2017). However, public funding for art made outside of the academy system has never been robust, and private funding, which until the onset of the pandemic primarily came from real estate wealth, has grown more cautious and reshuffled following the collapse of the China Evergrande Group beginning in 2021.¹¹ The subsequent closure of several real estate–backed museums, the sheer amount of funds allocated to state art museums, and the recent creation of new institutions backed by technology companies all throw into relief the survival of an organization like Three Shadows. At the symposium held for the Centre’s opening in 2007, inri presciently remarked, “It’s already too late now, but if we didn’t do it now, then there would be no way to do it later. . . . Our future as artists is very clear. . . . What we can do today, we will do. We must act now.” ¹²

inri’s words, particularly their urgency, continue to resonate in today’s quickly shifting, multipolar funding landscape. The uneven infrastructure belies the fact that photographic images permeate contemporary life in China. As much as interactions in the physical world, private snaps of everyday life, Facetuned selfies, studio and on-location photo shoots, carefully crafted carousels, and editorialized footage of events in entertainment and politics that will only be experienced digitally also make up life. People are simultaneously consumers and makers of images, and the speed at which these images are created, circulated, debated, and forgotten sets the pace of life. 

Inching toward 20 years, Three Shadows continues to bridge Chinese contemporary art and the global art circuit at a time when other avenues have seemingly dissolved. In the pictures that make up Tsumari Story and the designs of Three Shadows’ programming, the artists’ joy in having an interlocutor and their keen interest in exchanging ideas with the world are apparent. Creating and yielding spaces in their aesthetic and social acts, RongRong&inri demonstrate what commitment looks like and what can be accomplished in the face of apparent lack. The leading question the artists pose to themselves is what they can do for future generations. Always exploring with sensitivity and receptiveness, they reveal for us a way of existing in present circumstances with hope.

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