I met photographer Xing Danwen in the late 90s when I was curating China: 50 Years Inside the People's Republic at Aperture. The project - a view of a changing society as seen through photographs made by Chinese and Western photographers - was on a tight schedule, with an opening day at Asia Society fixed in stone.

While it wasn't so difficult finding great work by legends like Henri Cartier-Bresson as well as contemporary photojournalists including Stuart Franklin, it quickly became apparent that the other half of the sky was in constant danger of crashing down. Danwen was completing her graduate studies at School of Visual Arts at the time. While the work she was doing at SVA was compelling, it didn't lend itself to presentation in book format. One piece was a pair of 40-foot-long "scrolls" that were displayed on low tables. Luckily this imagery, black-and-white expressionistic images of daily life in Beijing, was adapted for Asia Society's digital display that spanned the wall above the information desk.

Above: Three images from A Personal Diary-China's Avant-Garde, 1993-1998. Copyright and courtesy Xing Danwen.

At the time, Danwen was also editing her long-term photojournalistic exploration of Beijing's East Village, honing it into book form from an unruly collection of a highly charged and politically risky photographs of China's avant-garde art colony - which was named for its New York counterpart. Because China: 50 Years was touring China, this work, if included, would have been axed by the cultural minister just as a good 30 percent of the show eventually was. But that's another story.

I felt hampered by the lack of great material by young Chinese photographers and stymied by the opinions of others who had voices louder than mine. While I wasn't able to include Danwen's work in the project, we stayed in touch over the years and I watched her work evolve along a path that never strayed too far from a central theme: the powerful sense of dislocation felt by the post-Tiananmen Square massacre generation, which includes Danwen, now 42. One series of gorgeous close-ups of electronic waste she shot around 2002 in southern China, ironically the place where many computers and peripherals are manufactured, appeared in American Effects at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003. Since then, Danwen has maintained an international exhibition schedule whose venues seem to increase exponentially each year.

So I was delighted by the news that arrived in my inbox a few weeks ago that several exhibitions of her work will be seen this year in the USA, starting with a show opening tomorrow night at San Francisco's Haines Gallery. And even more delighted that the work on view is from her Beijing East Village series, at last being seen as a collection.

Xing Danwen: A Personal Diary-China's Avant-Garde in the 1990s opens at Haines Gallery Thursday February 18 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. 49 Geary Street, suite 540, San Francisco, CA. 415.397.8114. Danwen will give a talk on Tuesday, March 2 starting at 7:00 pm at San Francisco Camera Work. Please check the website for information. Please visit Xing Danwen's website for information about exhibitions opening in March at arCH - Architecture Center Houston Foundation, and at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

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