FOR RICHER OR POORER Marriage, Market Economics and Olivia Martin-McGuire’s China Love
‘In the world’s biggest city, stories unfold in public spaces,’ says Olivia Martin-McGuire, in her feature-length documentary China Love (2018). As an Australian photographer living in Shanghai, Martin-McGuire often saw brides posing with their beaus in front of the city skyline – in plumes of chiffon, with blushing make-up, blow-wave curls, fake lashes and fuchsia bouquets – accompanied by professional photographers freighted with expensive gear. A performance of wedded bliss. But the brides weren’t yet brides: every year, thousands of young Chinese couples take pre-wedding photos up to six months before the official proceedings. Whose fantasy do the photos project, and why is it so important?
Such is the power of photography in selling and building new cultural myths of marriage. China Love begins with these chintzy pre-wedding images – which, locally, form an entire genre of commercial photography – to chart the rise of the marriage-industrial complex in modern China, a society in a state of rapid and often-contradictory change as free-market values mingle with authoritarian traditions. If the new Chinese dream is an emulation of everything American, what role do pre-wedding photos play in that dream?
Co-funded by Screen Australia and the ABC, and produced by Media Stockade’s Rebecca Barry and Madeleine Hetherton, China Love has
