Young Toughs...Yunnan

Originally born in Hong Kong, Liu Heung Shing was one of the first foreign photojournalists allowed into China after the beginning of the Reform Era in 1978. His training as a photographer in the United States and his Chinese cultural background gave him a unique perspective as both insider and outsider as he chronicled life in China during its dramatic and dynamic transformation. Today his photographs are considered some of the best documentary images of that period.

Young Toughs...Yunnan is one of Liu’s best known photographs, depicting three young liumang 流氓, or street toughs, typically impoverished rural youth swept up by post-Mao China’s urban underworld. The defiant, vaguely threatening attitude they present with their postures and expressions seems like a performance, an impression reinforced by the witnessing crowd that surrounds them, observing their interaction with the then-novel spectacle of a foreign photojournalist at work, seen in the reflection. The complex, underlying reality of the moment is both concealed by and reflected in their mirrored sunglasses.