The China Project

151 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection HAI Bo Hai Bo is one of a new generation of Chinese artists who use photography to register the traces of the past in a rapidly changing China. Working within the tradition of studio portraiture, Hai Bo’s photographs are intimate and personal testaments of the passage of time. In his two-part portrait, Three sisters 2000, three young women, pictured at the beginning of their adult lives, appear in a sepia-toned image. In the second frame, and in poses echoing the earlier photograph, two of the sisters are shown decades later, their faces lined with age. The third sister’s absence is palpable; as viewers, we can only guess what may have happened to her. Three sisters belongs to Hai Bo’s series ‘They’, in which each work consists of a pair of portraits. On the left, Hai Bo places a re-photographed portrait or group shot from the past, juxtaposing it with a recent photographic recreation of the scene in which each individual assumes an identical pose. The primary subjects of these photographs are time, memory, nostalgia and loss. Hai Bo obtains the original photographs from a variety of sources, although many are of friends or acquaintances. He then spends some time tracing the subjects, learning about their lives in the intervening years. Many of the original images are dated before or during the Cultural Revolution. China’s turbulent history is implied in each, although Hai Bo is never didactic, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions. Hai Bo explained his intentions in leaving his subject’s stories implied: ‘This is the work’s readability, also my own half-conscious effort to give the viewer free space to imagine, which then is another space of creation’. 1 Hai Bo is fascinated with time and nostalgia, describing a desire to recreate a past moment through his photographs; a moment which will exist in the hearts and minds of his subjects, and also in the viewer’s response. He says that ‘by restaging old photographs and strictly adhering to the way they were taken (for instance people must stay in the same positions), I intend not only to show changes that have taken place in people and society over time, but hope to recreate the past, if only in that moment when the shutter snaps’. 2 Although any attempt to recreate the past is doomed, what is valuable to him is the feeling he creates in himself, his viewers and the original subjects of the photographs. Three sisters is one of Hai Bo’s most poignant photographs. Little is known of the sitters, and their past is indeterminable from the image, which has a timeless quality. Knowing so little, we can only conjecture on their lives and, in so doing, are affected by a sense of wonder. Hai Bo’s photographs speak of individual experience, the ties of family and friendship, the transience of time and the frailty and brevity of human life. endnotes 1 “I mean to work at the line where life and art meet”: Hai Bo; a conversation with Huang Yan , <http:// www.maxprotetch.com/MEDIA/00295.pdf >, viewed 27 January 2009. 2 Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips (eds.), Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China [exhibition catalogue], David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; International Center of Photography, New York; and Steidl Publishers, Göttingen,  2004, p.184 Three sisters (from ‘They’ series) 2000 Black and white photographs, ed. of 18 / Diptych: 40 x 60cm (each) / Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund