WASHINGTON — Chinese photography erupted with creative energy in the early 1990s, only to subside about a decade later. It was a period of anxious uncertainty. The encouragement of capitalist practices and the partial easing of restrictions on political and artistic expression of the ’80s had ended abruptly and tragically with the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. By 1992, it was apparent that economic reforms would continue full throttle, but the political relaxation of the ’80s would not.

In that troubled time, there was an outpouring of artistic expression that utilized the camera but was as far as you can get from street photography or photojournalism. Poised and pointed, many of the most celebrated photographic images document a performance. In the shabby district on the eastern outskirts of Beijing that was called the East Village by the free-spirited artists who flocked there, the photographer Rong Rong depicted Zhang Huan, his naked body smeared with honey and fish oil, sitting naked for an hour in a torrid, fly-infested latrine, and the androgynous Ma Liuming inhabiting his feminine alter ego and sauntering gracefully in the nude through a courtyard. The political became very personal.

Like a hornet trapped in amber, the tumult of those days can be viewed in the exhibition “A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China,” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, through Jan. 7. (After May 7, it will be displayed in a slightly abridged version.) The 186 works in the show — from this era, with a handful of more recent exceptions — are mostly drawn from the collection of Larry Warsh, who has promised 141 of them to the museum.