China and the West

Inge Morath & Arthur Miller in China – Inge Morath Foundation
http://www.ingemorath.org/index.php/2009/01/inge-morath-arthur-miller-china-introduction/.
Introduction by John P. Jacob, Inge Morath Foundation, for the exhibition Inge Morath and Arthur Miller: China, University of Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor, 2008.
Morath preferred to work in "countries whose influence extends beyond their borders; mother cultures," and she dreamed of traveling the Silk Road, from Europe through Persia to China.
Morath enrolled in the Berlitz School of Languages to learn Mandarin Chinese. She would continue her studies of Chinese language and culture for the remainder of her life, noting more than once the pleasantly soporific effect that Chinese grammar had on her.
In the late 1970s, Morath and Miller were invited by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries to travel within China, and they made the first of several journeys in 1978 (Morath returned alone in 1979, and again with Miller, for the staging of Death of a Salesman in Beijing, in 1983). Morath's journals reflect the depth of her experience of Chinese culture. They also reveal her recurrent frustration with the camera’s limited ability to capture the nuances of light and life in China. The frequent surprised, staring faces that distinguish her photographs of China confirm the difficulty that her journals describe for a foreign photographer to go unnoticed by her subjects in a nation where, only a short time before, the presence of foreigners was limited and communication with them restricted. China was one of the few countries to which she traveled where, in spite of her fluency in Mandarin, Morath remained an outsider. Morath's journals complain bitterly of her inability to blend in, and thus empathically to comprehend.
In China, however, Morath's and Miller's movements were limited to what policy and the interests of their individual guides would permit. China is experienced as something outside the window of a large black car which refuses to stop for her; a series of briefing rooms and banquets. For Miller, contact with China is achieved through probing; for Morath, through dining. Encounters with one superbly cooked dish after another, meal after meal, is as close to a sustained, satisfying dance with China as Morath's handlers would allow her.
"I am especially interested in photographing in countries where a new tradition emerges from an ancient one," Morath wrote. Certainly, China in 1978 was a country where civilization and development were subject to critical scrutiny, and both ancient and modern traditions were being publicly re-examined for their validity within a culture of change. What distinguishes Inge Morath's photographs of China from other, similar bodies of work, is her urgent desire to comprehend, and to convey in pictures, what Miller describes as "China's contradiction;" the ongoing struggle of new traditions in conflict with ancient ones. Although Morath is drawn to the beautiful and mysterious, the intensity of her experience and the intractability of her subject defy simplification. Morath encountered China as an irresolvable question, a dialogue between tradition and modernity within which beauty and tyranny collide again and again. The awareness of China's greatness, and of the concurrent greatness of her tragedy, is pervasive.