Three Sisters

Hai Bo is a pioneer of the contemporary Chinese art-photography movement. He graduated from the Jilin Institute of Art in 1984, before moving to Beijing to study printmaking at the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts. During the late 1980s and early '90s, Hai began to experiment with photography, which at the time in China was used primarily for documentary purposes. His initial work remained largely documentary, but instead of simply recording the existence of things, he began to show the absence of things and the changes in things over time. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hai has developed this basic strategy still further and is now creating very sophisticated sets of images that comment profoundly on the uncertain and unstable nature of perception, memory, and time itself.

Three Sisters is one of Hai's early works. It belongs to a series of diptych images the artist produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in which he re-creates photographs of people who were originally taken between the 1940s and 1970s. By composing the subjects in the same arrangements as the original photos and juxtaposing the two images, Hai sets up a poignant confrontation between past and present. In this diptych, for example, the contrast between the hopeful-looking young women in the earlier photograph and the missing figure and obvious signs of aging on the faces of the two remaining women in the later photograph, forces us to reflect on the turbulent history of modern China and the very personal toll it has taken on individuals and families. Even without knowing the specific story of these three sisters, viewers can empathize with them based on their own experiences with the passage of time. The visual premise of the work is quite simple, but the emotional impact is complex and marks it-and the larger series to which it belongs-as one of the most interesting and successful examples of Chinese photography from the 1990s.