From Huawei to the European Parliament Elections: How Does Photography Bring the Public Closer to the Headlines?

"Art and Exhibitions" is a new QDaily column, updated weekly. We try to use an independent eye to show the art world as it really is — real, interesting, and sometimes not especially likable.

Almost from the day it was born, photography has been two things at once: art and evidence. Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photographs were the evidence officials at the U.S. Farm Security Administration held up to voters; Robert Capa's The Falling Soldier was evidence of how brutal the Spanish Civil War was; the picture Nilüfer Demir took of a Syrian boy lying on a beach was evidence of the refugee crisis…

What these news photographs have in common is that they stretch the reader's field of vision enormously, putting forward an overlooked fact with hard credibility and visual force. They are also, sometimes, sponsored — or fitted after publication with a third party's reading, and put to work in one or another scene of "judgment."

Last week, photojournalist Kevin Frayer's series Inside Huawei, China's Tech Giant ran on the main pages of several outlets. Most of the pictures were taken this April, when Frayer got a rare chance to go inside the tech giant's Shenzhen and Dongguan campuses and look around. Some departments were closed to him for reasons of technical secrecy, Frayer said, but on the whole Huawei was remarkably candid about the shoot.

"My goal was to take people one step past the breaking news and the headlines, to see what the company actually looks like and what kind of people work there," Frayer said.

Next to the great photographs mentioned above, Frayer's Huawei series does not hit the viewer with the same visual shock. What makes it interesting is the disenchantment — the stripping of myth from the company. The rows of European-style buildings on the Dongguan campus; the facial-recognition system that manages staff coming and going; the lights dimmed all at once for the lunchtime nap; the rail service that ferries employees around the site… readers get a far more concrete sense of the working atmosphere inside this much-suspected, oversized company.

You can see more photos, and the photographer's account of the assignment, here.

Big Events

Japan's Nomura Holdings held the first award ceremony for the Nomura Emerging Artist Award. The winners were the Chinese artist Cheng Ran and the American artist Cameron Rowland. Each takes home $100,000 in cash, with no strings on how it is spent.

The Nomura Emerging Artist Award is meant to recognize and support strong artists early in their careers. This October, Nomura will also hand out the first Nomura Art Award, in Shanghai, honoring an artist who has "completed a substantial body of work of major cultural significance." That prize is $1 million — currently the richest art prize in the world.

Cheng Ran, born in 1981, lives in Hangzhou. His video work draws on Chinese and Western literature, poetry, film and visual culture, and digs into questions of mental states and cultural difference. The narratives are usually set in a global context: his Diary of a Madman series, for instance, turns the camera on Manhattan, Jerusalem and Hong Kong, using abnormal — even pathological — subjects to explore the people inside cities, and the world those people live in.

Some of Cheng Ran's work is here.

Art is back on the Trump administration's tariff list. If U.S. President Trump makes good on his threat to tax the remaining $300 billion-plus of Chinese imports, Chinese antiquities — no matter where they are shipped from — will "enjoy" the same treatment as silk and building materials.

Chinese antiquities landed on a tariff list once before, last year, but museums and dealers successfully lobbied the U.S. government for an exemption. One of the lobbyists' main arguments was that taxing Chinese antiques and artworks would only damage the American art market, while possibly doing China — which would like to see art come home — a favor. A lawyer on the lobbying side says he is confident the government can be talked out of it again.

Artists Say

"If you don't take part in democracy, someone else will decide for you."

Wolfgang Tillmans, German artist. artnet

The well-known German artist Wolfgang Tillmans has joined forces with a group of photographers and designers to launch a campaign called "Vote Together". Its aim is blunt: get people to cast a ballot in the European Parliament elections on May 26.

The European Parliament is elected every five years, by direct vote of the citizens of EU member states. Compared with national elections, European Parliament elections usually draw little attention, but the Parliament matters on food safety, immigration, environmental protection and other issues. With Brexit as the backdrop, this vote is also a test of confidence in European integration. Polls so far show Euroskeptic and nationalist parties on course for big gains, and Stephen Bannon, the godfather of the alt-right and former White House chief strategist, is in Europe drumming up votes.

So the left is pinning its hopes on a late surge in turnout among the young. Vote Together has designed a large number of images and posters in 24 European languages for participants to print and hand out themselves. Celebrities have pitched in: the British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood put on a Vote Together T-shirt to remind people that "526" is a special date.

Tillmans may be Germany's most important living artist, and he was the first photographer, and the first non-British artist, to win the Turner Prize. His working life has taken in an unusually wide range of social causes.

A Matter of Taste

Gucci has released its 2019 pre-fall campaign, shot by Harmony Korine, with the musician Harry Styles again in the lead. In the pictures Styles is set against all sorts of messy backdrops — pigs, swans, ancient Greek statues.

Next week Gucci will go on showing off its links to classical heritage. After New York, London, Florence and Arles in earlier years, Gucci has picked Rome, the city where its creative team is based, for its Cruise 2020 show. The venue, the Capitoline Museums, is considered the oldest museum complex in the world. Gucci said in a press release that the choice of setting was meant to continue creative director Alessandro Michele's dialogue with the old world.

Mention modern Belgian art and it is easy to think of the famous Surrealist René Magritte. "We are a small country, but our culture puts a lot of weight on education, art and radical fashion," says the chairman of the luxury leather goods brand Delvaux, explaining where the brand's tie to Magritte comes from. The world's oldest maker of luxury leather goods has worked with the Magritte Foundation several times, on joint product lines and on sponsoring the artist's exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and elsewhere.

Delvaux recently opened a new flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York, and has again reached for Magritte's legacy. It will show five never-before-seen Magritte works on site, and has put his motifs on handbags, wallets, luggage and other leather goods. artnet talked to Delvaux's chairman and CEO about how the collaboration came together, and about "why art and fashion are moving closer together."

Market Makers

The art market has its eye on Gen Z. Marc Sands, a marketing specialist at the auction house Bonhams, says "the next generation may never go back to the media the last generation used" — a change in how information travels that will shape the art market's future. An editor at The Art Newspaper thinks the younger generation is not much taken with brands, or with anything attached to big business, which may give struggling small galleries a fresh push. Will it?

Separately, the Chinese edition of The Art Newspaper has launched a column called "Art Connections," which sets out to "explore, from a brand's point of view, how companies should get involved in art and culture." They recently interviewed Thomas Girst, BMW Group's director of cultural engagement. Besides the "BMW Art Cars," BMW Group backs many artists and exhibitions.

In the interview Girst raised an interesting point: some young Chinese artists have no misgivings at all about working with brands — "but sometimes I wish those misgivings existed." As he sees it, the line between art and commerce looks especially blurred in China, even though most of the brands involved come from Europe.

Some Exhibitions

Camp: Notes on Fashion. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US. After the noisy Met Gala benefit dinner, you can go to the Met and look at the real star behind it. Camp: Notes on Fashion traces the shifts in fashion and taste since the 17th century through more than 250 objects, showing how irony, humor, exaggeration and theatricality gathered in clothes. Through September 8. Adult tickets $25.

Edvard Munch: Love and Angst. The British Museum, London, England. The British Museum is holding a major retrospective of the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, built around his prints. You certainly know The Scream; the same fierce emotion, the same direct strike at the modern mind, runs through his other work. If you are in London, don't miss it. Through July 21. Adult tickets £17; look out for discounted tickets.

Supports/Surfaces: A Radical Experiment in Deconstructing Painting (1967–1974). Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing. "Supports/Surfaces" was an art movement started by young French artists in the mid-to-late 1960s that tried to pull painting and sculpture away from the traditional frame and pedestal. Through August 20. Adult tickets 20 yuan.

Adrift on the Sea: Treasures of Pacific Art from the Musée du Quai Branly. Shanghai Museum, Shanghai. Masks, musical instruments, jewelry, cloth… these everyday, decorative and religious objects will help you understand the little-known civilizations of Oceania, and imagine the lives of islanders moving among the archipelagos in close contact with the sea. Through August 18. Free.

Repeating Reality: From Wang Bing's Video Collection. OCAT Shanghai, Shanghai. The private collector Wang Bing treats 2008 as a turning point in contemporary Chinese history; this show gathers video art by the "post-Olympics generation" of young Chinese artists. Through June 16. Free.

Cover image: Kevin Frayer / Stringer, Getty.