Hai Bo’s exhibition will feature new work that focuses on figures isolated within expansive, disappearing Northern Chinese landscapes. Hai Bo has increased the scale and amplified the color in iconic images of bicyclists, farmers, and vernacular Chinese architecture. The subjects of Hai Bo’s elegiac images live at the edge of extinction; they are men with one foot in the past, amidst uncontrolled cultural and economic change.

Hai Bo uses the body as a solitary marker within serene landscapes that examine sentimentality without falling predictably into that territory. While the images may appear traditionally romantic, they take on new meaning in a Chinese political context that favors the group over the individual and ignores the passage of time and personal history. As aggressively as Chinese contemporary culture looks to the future, it also suppresses its past. Hai Bo’s willingness to engage the threshold between the two is a decisively radical stance.

Hai Bo notes that his images aim to capture the “confused, lonely, and helpless feeling” of a people caught up in a whirlwind of change, yet the work also describes a historic wager between modernization and the loss of a traditional way of life. Ultimately, these images of “far-flung, desolate northern scenes” perform a subversive act within Chinese culture—they document the past, or as Hai Bo says, they “witness the period of my own history.”