Selfiers: Sealed with Images

From August to December 1982, five to six years after the downfall of the “Gang of Four” and the reform and opening-up policy in China, twopen pals who had never met found themselves connected through a photography magazine. Xu Lei, a university professor, and He Bo,military personnel specialized in artistic pursuits at the border, were eagerly practicing the novel photographic technique of “self-portrait” in the respective contexts of life and work. Ever since then, they started exchanging self-portraits and engaged in genuine discussions about their insights and experiences of self-portraits through letters.From August to December 2016, Xu Lei and He Bo, avid explorers of photography history and culture, recreated some staged group portraits from the 1970s and 1980s. They crudely superimposed their faces on to the faces in the original photographs. These forged images and textual evidence were later presented in exhibitions over the next few years, mostly taking the form of archival documents. They were replete with traces of contradictions or deliberate falsifications of historical facts. Through this project, they aspired to draw people’s attention to the conspiracy of photographs and words in the act of storytelling, as well as the delicate relationship between the visual aura of “evidence” given by old photographs and letters and the notionof “true history.”

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