Nearly four years after the Tiananmen student protests in 1989, RongRong, then a 25-year-old from the southern province of Fujian, joined a group of young and struggling bohemian artists who settled in a desolate village on the outskirts of Beijing. RongRong captured the quotidian yet eruptive life of this community, as many of his fellow artists pushed their bodies to the brink to create radical and subversive performances. Considered highly disruptive by political authorities, these artists lived under constant fear of harassment, raids, and arrests. Both as a principal photographer and essential collaborator, RongRong faithfully documented what remain some of the most powerful and important performance works of Chinese contemporary art, by artists such as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Ai Weiwei.

The exhibition Day After Day: RongRong and the Beijing East Village features forty of RongRong's seminal photographs from 1993–1998 portraying the Beijing East Village—an artistic community poignantly described by Silvia Fok as "a meteor in the history of contemporary Chinese art." Day After Day coincides with the planned summer publication by The Walther Collection and Steidl.

The exhibition Day After Day emphasizes these explosive performance art activities in the village, before and after it was forcefully evacuated in the summer of 1994. RongRong's emotive photographs will be paired with excerpts from a diary that RongRong kept during his stay in the village, as well as his present-day recollections. Such writings provide essential insight into the performances as they were being conceptualized and carried out, such as the extreme heat and squalid conditions of the public latrine that was the setting for Zhang Huan's 12 Square Meters; the ominous arrest of artists and viewers that followed Ma Liuming's groundbreaking nude performance Fen-Ma Liuming's Lunch; and the chilly evening when the collaborative Primordial Sounds took place beneath a Beijing overpass.