Photographs inform our understanding of history. The Korean War began in 1950, when I was 12 years old, and I remember that the Chinese troops who crossed the Yalu River to intervene on the side of the North Koreans were constantly described as a "horde." A horde is a human but faceless mass, and that was my image of the Communists fighting the United Nations and U.S. forces defending South Korea. Xiao Zhuang's picture "Old woman asks a man to write a letter for her to her son fighting in Korea, 1953" made me realize that that horde was made up of sons and husbands and brothers—real men with real families. The concern harrowing the face of this illiterate woman changed my understanding of the Cold War conflict fought more than half a century ago.

The 100 pictures at the China Institute were culled from the 600 of a larger exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art; the 600 from a reservoir of 20,000. There is nothing about them of Socialist-Realist kitsch, or the vapid postmodern clichés that blighted 2004's big Asia Society-International Center of Photography show of contemporary Chinese photography. Only one picture, Liu Jun's "A Parent-Official Like This: The brutal village cadre knocks an old peasant to the ground, 1985," hints at the repressive nature of the Communist regime, but all have sympathy for their subjects and their frequently mean lives. Although the pictures were printed uniformly, their content is quite varied: Many are genuinely moving, such as Yuan Xuejun's "A 72-year-old veteran Taiwan soldier returns to his ancestral village, 1987," and some, like An Ge's "Where a road is built through a mountainous region, young children have run uphill to watch automobiles, 1982," echo the delicate beauty of classic Chinese art.