Beijing photographer Chen Man (b.1980) is the leading photographer of her generation. Over the past seven years she has contributed to some of the world’s best-known lifestyle magazines and produced acclaimed campaigns for international brands such as Motorola and Adidas.

Chen gained prominence in 2003 when she completed a series of ground-breaking covers for the China-based design and arts magazine Vision. Although then still a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the images she produced crashed the conservatism of China’s media industry at the time and captured the spirit of creative possibility that was driving a new generation of artists and designers.

Chen made eight covers for Vision. Each image is based on an original studio shot that is digitally enhanced in post production. However, it is the eclectic range of motifs and influences in her work, from Mickey Mouse and Manga to the Three Gorges Dam and the Great Wall, that best characterize her aesthetic.

Over the past decade, the growing number of partnerships between foreign and domestic publishers has provided Chen with a wide platform to develop her career. As well as Vision she has produced shoots for Vogue, Bazaar, Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Modern Weekly, among others. The development of Chen’s work can therefore be seen to closely track the development of China’s media and advertising industries as well as the growing sophistication of its art scene, and the frequent points of intersection between the two.

In less than 10 years, Chen has established herself as perhaps China’s most successful commercial photographer, and certainly China’s most successful woman photographer ever.  The latter fact underlines the profound changes that China’s cultural landscape has undergone and the increasingly prominent role that women artists are playing in it.

Chen Man: Works 2003-2010 is the first survey of Chen Man’s career and spans the entire range of her work, from her earliest cover shoots to new, as-yet unpublished images. Articles by Karen Smith and Liu Heung-shing place the artist’s work in context and provide an insight into the artist's working processes and inspiration.

Chen Man: Works 2003-2010 is published as a limited edition of 2,000 individually numbered copies.

About the Editor
John Millichap is a journalist and curator. He has lived in China for more than 10 years and founded 3030 Press in 2005. He is also the editor of 3030: New Photography in China (3030 Press, 2006), a survey of 30 emerging photographers in China aged under 30.

About the Authors
Karen Smith is a British art historian specializing in contemporary Chinese art in the post-Mao era. She has contributed to numerous journals and exhibition catalogues and is the author of books including Ai Weiwei (Phaidon, 2009) and was a contributing author for China: Portrait of a Country (Taschen, 2008). Her curatorial work includes the exhibitions The Real Thing at Tate Liverpool (2007) and The Chinese: Photography and Video Art from China at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2004). She has lived in Beijing since 1992.

Liu Heung-shing is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer whose images have shaped western perceptions of China for more than a generation. In 1978 he was Time magazine’s first photojournalist based in Beijing following normalization of relations with the USA and later worked as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press. He was named Best Feature and Spot News Photographer by The Associated Press Managing Editors Association in 1985 and 1991 respectively, and in 1992 shared the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the Overseas Press Club Award for his coverage of the Soviet Union. He is the author of China After Mao (Penguin, 1982) and USSR: Collapse of an Empire (Associated Press, 1992) and was the editor of China: Portrait of a Country (Taschen, 2008). In 2005 Paris Photo named him one of the 100 most influential figures in contemporary photography.