I will not endow the small human figures in my photographs with the meaning of sculptures. They are common everywhere…this is just like my state at the time of carelessly pressing the camera shutter. These photographs as a coherent series will present the faces of carelessness… but their importance for me lies in the fact that after ten years, in these photographs, I am not only released from the depression of time, but even more that I am moved by these faces who once just passed me by but were fixed eternally on my camera film. They seem déjà-vu familiar but feel strange. They come from the most secret layers of life.

(Statements by the Artist, 2007)

Among photographers in China today, Han Lei is one of a very small number who stick to the plain, clumsy techniques of photography to present what he is thinking. His art is not founded in the gratification of the senses, but is structured in a misallocation of history and reality, forming a dialogue between the microscopic world of the individual and the macroscopic world of history.

(Zheng Naiming, Overlap – The New Reflective Image of History and Reality: Reading Han Lei’s Photographic Art, [Selected]2007)