Once while travelling in Guilin, I was approached by a Chinese gent of about 30 years of age, who held out his digital camera, looked at me and motioned for me to come over. I went to take the camera in order to take a photo of him and his friend. But he said, with wobbly pride, “No, no… I would be honoured to have my photo taken with you.” He then smiled a beaming grin that radiated such honest sentiment that I could not deny him this small favour. However, as I’d been in China less than a month, I was not used to such unwarranted attention. For a moment I thought perhaps he had mistaken me for Wayne Rooney’s uglier younger brother (false modesty aside, it’s amazing the amount of times Chinese people have exclaimed “You look like Beckham!” when sadly, I look nothing like him). Little was I to know that the presence of a foreigner in China is enough to make even the most reclusive of technophobes pick up a camera, step forward and ask nervously, “May I make a photo with you?”

Last summer I went to Shanghai to work at the World Expo. A lot of people asked me, “What is an Expo?”, “What kind of work will you be doing?”, “What do you think it’s going to be like there?” In all honesty I had absolutely no idea how to answer any of these questions, but an American friend of mine summed up the first quite nicely, saying that a World Expo is like the Olympics without any sport. Meaning that millions of people flock to see a big spectacle, there’s lots of advertising and corporate sponsorship, only no sporting events occur. And with millions of visitors come millions of digital cameras, snapping away merrily to record memories, or even more accurately, to wow the folks back home.

So at the Expo, my job (along with 90% of the other foreigners—hailing from all parts of the globe—working there) was to stand inside one of the national ‘Pavilions’, ensure that the visitors were having a good time, following the rules (i.e. not spitting, smoking or defecating on the floor), and to pose for the occasional photo. There was little that could have prepared me for the frenetic onslaught that ensued. In almost every group of tourists, a few would excitedly ask for a photo with the ‘laowai’. Usually this was fine, but on bad days, when it was hot and sweaty, the last thing you wanted was to be suddenly embraced against your will by an overweight middle-aged Chinese man with sweat cascading from every pore onto your person, physically turning you to look in the direction of about 15 camera lenses and smile sweetly as if you were enjoying this marvelous novel concept of ‘making a new friend’. Worst of all, after one person had done it, the following crowd would also express manifest delight at the idea of being caught on celluloid standing next to this foreign creature, beaming inanely like they’d tamed a wild beast. A fellow Brit working at the same pavilion took count and racked up an astounding 473 pictures in one shift. It’s a wonder our retinas weren’t burnt away by the incessant flashes. Some of us mused that we’d probably get less attention if we were wearing a full-body animal costume, like mascots at sports events.

The Power of The Pout
Recently I saw the online photo album of a Chinese friend living in the UK. There were about 30 photos, each one of them a self-taken portrait taken with a mobile phone or digital camera. This reminded me of the mobile phone background or screensaver of many of my female Chinese friends which was exactly the same: a self-made portrait of them looking ‘cute’ or pouting. “What is the obsession with this?!” I thought. (Have a look yourselves… you’ll see it everywhere)

There’s obviously a clandestine points system in place, and I’m sure they all post their photos up onto some secretive National League, rating each other and scoring for cuteness, eye size (bonus points for coloured or black contact lenses), intensity of pout, and the degree of upwards angle at which you stare into the phone/camera. Double your points if you manage to get a cuddly toy, or anything pink or glittery into the frame. Treble points if you are wearing plastic glasses frames with no lenses.

There’s been speculation about the source of this adoration of ‘cuteness’; many believe it is a Japanese import, where it’s not unusual to walk down a busy street in Harajuku, Tokyo and see a number of young girls dressed as cute bunnies, or their favourite characters from role play games. The Chinese version is a lot subtler, but its delusions of glamour remain just as convinced.

Similarly, the act of holding up two fingers in what was traditionally the ‘V for Victory’ sign (and historically the British longbow army’s way of taunting the French army!) is pandemic across all of eastern Asia. In Japan, Korea and China, it is de rigeur to hold two, or four fingers up next to your head while being photographed. There are novel variations, including the ‘gun hand’, ‘salute’ (a satirical nod to Red Army throwbacks, perhaps?) and the ‘reverse V’ (which to you and I looks just like swearing) which leaves us pondering… “What exciting embellishments could be in store for the future of photographic hand-gesturing?”

Flower Power
Another fascinating sight from a Western perspective, is visiting a Chinese floral park on a sunny spring day. If you can’t find a park, or if your local park doesn’t have any plant life in it, then head to a University campus – that will do just as well. Now look closely and you might see: in that area above the flowerbeds, normally reserved for butterflies, bees, wasps and flies, you will find a full grown Chinese adult, either semi-kneeling or squatting, holding the flower head to his/her face while another of these odd creatures clenches a photographic device (of which they have the most rudimentary of operating knowledge) and takes photos of the whole spectacle. According to the frequency and widespread scale of this event, it is not an unusual phenomenon. Sometimes the flower head is exchanged for a creeping vine, or in rarer cases, the branch of a particularly verdant tree. In more violent cases, the entire flower head is plucked from its stem, and held aloft, or worn in the user’s hair, like some bucolic emblem of victory. Again, these legions of plant-pluckers must be posting their records surreptitiously on an internet database, to compete with other Chinese contestants, in who has decapitated the most flowers; who trampled the most flowerbeds; who has upset the most insects. It seems the Chinese take the phrase “Getting close to nature a little too far when it comes to photographing it.

Unfortunately for us non-Chinese, it can also spoil it somewhat when you want to enjoy a relaxing day out in the park, but you can’t because half the town is prancing about in the mud tossing petals around like savage hippies from a forgotten era.

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Keywords: Photography in China common photography gestures China snap happy Chinese Chinese girls pouting