They

Hai Bo is a contemporary Chinese artist whose practice has been shaped by his experience of growing up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76). They no. 5 presents two photographs of the same group of people, taken over thirty years apart, with the empty chairs and spaces in the second photograph a sombre reminder of those no longer alive. On one level the work comments on the radical changes in Chinese society in the intervening years, and, on another, it evokes notions of memory, ageing, individuality, resilience and the passing of time.

The first photograph reproduces a small ‘souvenir’ portrait of a group of workers, given to him by one of the participants. Hai Bo painstakingly tracked the surviving members of the group for what became an emotional reunion. When taking the new photograph, Hai Bo asked the participants to adopt the same pose and to attempt to replicate the feelings they had when the original photograph was taken. His aim was ‘retrieving the time itself, at reproducing the past, even if the recapturing is as brief as the moment of pressing the shutter release’.1

1 Hai Bo, Shanghai Biennale 2000 (catalogue), Shanghai shu hua chu ban she, p. 74.

Julie Robinson, Senior Curator Prints, Drawings and Photographs