art workIn the 1980’s, I was an enthusiastic lover of photography – I joined a few photography associations and took many photographs. By the end of the 80’s, I had a special column in China Photography Chronicle. At the time, China Photography Chronicles was leaning toward works with a “formalist beauty”, whereas People’s Photography emphasized the introduction of realist photography. In 1989, I benefited from a coincidental opportunity – I met with the Shaanxi photographers Hu Wugong and Hou Dengke, and was shaken by their “realist photography”. When I think of them now, not only were their photographs uniquely innovative in form and content, they had an obvious “foresight” – that is, what we now call an “avant-garde consciousness”. Certain elements of “conceptual photography” have already begun to be unveiled. Besides representing harvest helpers and the villagers’ lives, they also paid special attention to the existence and development of Christianity in rural China. This was all rather distinct at the time and had a strong flavor of the avant-garde. Even if we look at them from our current perspective, they would not appear backward. Their pictures not only recorded the actual reality of Christianity in rural China, but were filled with the photographers’ subjective vision; moreover, they were strong in their form and sense of pictorial manipulation. It was difficult to publish those photographs in newspapers and magazines in the mainland, and only a small number were published on the American magazine National Geographic. I remember that when we drank together, Hu Wugong complained about this.art workTime has gone by so fast, in the twinkling of an eye everything has changed! In recent years photography has been released from its duty to serve as merely a “tool of documentation”, and has stepped proudly into the palace of art. Artists using photography as their main creative method have first increased gradually, but then with great momentum until it has now become a common practice. Han Lei is one of the most outstanding among these photographers.At a dinner party, an art critic heard that I was planning to hold a solo show for Han Lei and said, “I thought his earlier realist photography was well done.” It’s this kind of phrase that led to my earlier monologue. In my philosophy, I have always agreed with an old saying, “a dog will never lose its shit-eating habit (one’s nature is difficult to change).” One’s mentality and taste are often formed in childhood, in youth, middle age and old age there are only “revisions”. If a person is completely derailed from the track he has set, and gets into another’s trendy fast car, what await him will be nothing but failure. Therefore, I think that Han Lei’s so-called early “Realist Photography” is in fact like Hu Wugong’s “Christianity in the Countryside” – both have the conceptualization that is a type of preparation.Han Lei’s earlier photography seemed rather unintentional, perhaps they were indeed. But the uncommon perspectives and dislocated attitude reveal a decisive stand. That is, they are not attempting to restore the reality of life, but rather are intended to reveal the artist’s thinking process through his manipulation of the subject matter; from a public discourse, entering into the artist’s hidden personal space. It is a representation, a remaking, rather than simply a presentation. The meaning and form that are contained cannot be described simply as “representing life” or “recording time”.art workThereafter, Han Lei created many “landscape” works which I still consider excellent. Among these landscape images, Han Lei seems to have purposefully suppressed his temperament and appeal, but used an extremely industrial method to extract from the image things such as “beautiful nature” and “a great sentiment shared by humanity” – there was something here resembling the “industrial noise” in rock music. These flat, lifeless “dry scenes” are framed in black, the images filled with the flavor of Chinese classical poetry and concepts of traditional Chinese painting become simple and coarse, yet also powerful and strong. They have broken through the Chinese literati tradition, and stepped up onto the plane of contemporary art. Taking the great scenery of the present and folding it into memories at dusk, deconstructing the western perspective of focus and the mechanical outcome of the industrial revolution for a diffuse and dispersed perspective, using photographs to gain the effect of on-canvas imagery. The dislocation of post-modernism has once again been overthrown. Those common rootless landscapes are endowed with boundless meanings by Han Lei, they should be like Han Lei’s “realist photographs”, even though they are of their own school in terms of aesthetics, but their meaning for socialism far exceeds their aesthetic meaning.I once asked Han Lei why he stopped working with landscapes, his reply was that there were too many imitations, and that he had already lost interest in such endless repetitions.art workThus, Han Lei began to shoot portraits, images almost entirely uniform and sharing almost exactly the same unrefined background curtain. Han Lei’s portraits can be generally categorized into the typical and atypical types.What I call typical portraiture refers to those portraits with special costumes and special background – for instance, roles in the Peking Opera. On the surface, Han Lei freely selects the most common moments and models from Peking Opera performances, purposefully distancing these from “artistic photographs” and “made-up photographs” in order to demonstrate that they are indeed unrelated to Peking Opera or its particular culture, even though the models are performers selected from Peking Opera troupes. It is only a borrowing of props from Peking Opera with the intention of expressing an entirely different meaning. Then, what is this other meaning? Is it social, it is human, or to be precise, does it have to do with people’s role in society and their role-playing? It is a question of psychology and psychological signals. Our role in contemporary society is already blurry, perhaps among the many murky modes of explanation there is also misreading, both active misreading and passive misreading; or, perhaps there is even an tempting misreading. Therefore, the undefined roles of people is one the most interesting and most “profound” topics in contemporary society. Han Lei sets his particular figures in uncommon environments (not on stage, the make-up room or any such typical environment). With his purposeful changes and attempts to blur people’s normal field of vision, the main body of ideas is guided away from the easily distinguished exterior to the most profound space of hidden interiority. The unanimity on the surface brings out the multiplicity of the hidden, this creates a distance from the last generation of Chinese artists whose fervor wish was to express the past “Chinese reality” of thousands of people with one face and ten thousand people with the same heart. But the replacement or novel explanation of concepts served to reveal the artist’s deliberate intention and logic.art workWhat I refer to as non-typical portraits are those within Han Lei’s portraitures that have been picked carelessly without any apparent principle of selection. For instance, “Chubby” in fact has profoundly revealed the artist’s the dexterity and intelligence of the artist’s creativity. Portraits of the most common kind are completed with finishing techniques of lesser quality than those used in commercial photo studios. If they were set in real life, they would be meaningless, or perhaps simply a waste of film, becoming just another common picture. On the contrary, a photograph into which has been inserted the artist’s conception forces the viewer to analyze it as a work of art – people must work hard to examine the meaning “behind” it – as “Pop-art” or as “found objects”. When you are in a conceptual era, producing concepts as though they’re going to be lost is perhaps the only way to come up with a good concept, a concept worth tampering with.There is another kind of work in the portraits created by Han Lei—using portraiture to tell a pre-existing story. For instance, The Golden Lotus, a series of three, consists of Wu Song, Ximen Qing, Pan Jinlian, all wearing stage costumes and carrying obvious personal symbols, composing a “life of drama”. Beyond the original version of The Golden Lotus, beyond drama, beyond the artist’s careful planning, what do you think this is trying to tell! Gee, this is contemporary art!Recently, Han Lei’s creativity seems have became more free, even though from time to time there is an easily recognizable Chinese symbolism. In my opinion, this is only coincidental, because in terms of the overall chaos and purposeful awkwardness, it is not difficult to tell that Han Lei is in fact unconsciously dealing with politics or academics. He is a photographer at will, because he’s already prepared, thus, whatever pictures he takes will simply be taken. This is how I understand Han Lei.