Them #6,

1999

The photographer Hai Bo learned printmaking before studying as a woodcarver at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He started making photographs in 1999, when he produced the series Them and They, in which he restaged group portraits from existing photographs. Them #6 is an enlarged version of a studio photograph taken in 1973, produced during the Cultural Revolution and inscribed, “For the future.” Hai Bo pairs this image with his portrait of the same group of sixteen women twenty-six years later. The artist’s reinterpretation of a past moment evokes the common practice in Chinese painting of studying and copying or duplicating past models and styles in order to produce a new artistic synthesis. Them #6 also illustrates, through fashion, culture, and photo- graphic technology, the magnitude of change experienced in China during the last decades of the twentieth century.