They No. 5

Hai Bo collected official group portraits taken decades ago and then restaged the portraits with as many of the original sitters as he could find. When comparing the old and new images, mundane details—the cut of hair, the style of clothes—hint at China’s move away from a collectively oriented, state-dominated culture. The missing people in the second photographs may be untraceable, dead, or simply uninterested in participating in this art project.

The older photographs in these pairs are the found vintage prints that sparked this project. Hai Bo usually shows the pairs as enlarged prints; this presentation offers a special encounter with the portable, intimate original images.