A year after being admitted to college in 1985, Han Lei began to take photos. It was photo-making that aroused his desire to express, therefore becoming the medium for his voice. Believing photography was a desire-driven action, he never associated photographs with faithful recording, even his own photos. There will still be an objective note in the lens even if the photographer becomes the subject or part of the situation in the photo.

Han took to photography at a time when Chinese photographers had just awaken from the Cultural Revolution and begun to turn the lens to the grassroots and the spirited country as a whole. From the outset he had tried to capture what he saw in an unvarnished way. What were featured in his early black-and-white photos were mostly chance occurrences, but they were absolutely reasonable part of the everyday reality. As such, these photos with elements from reality were mistakenly labeled documentary or photojournalism. As a matter of fact, these truly subjective pictures did not acquire the function of objective recording despite their realistic appearance. He focused more on the psychological aspect of these photos. The photographic situation had to appeal to him and arouse his curiosity in the first place. Only in this way could his psychic energy be projected onto a corner that could seem featureless to other people. In the second place he had to explore the psychology of the subject, reading the face to capture the subtlety of the state of mind and the sensitive personality, not the clearly manifested delight or depression. In this sense Han was nothing short of a face-reader with a camera in hand who describes the mind with his camera.

While taking a photograph, Han always maintains psychological distance from the subject, never intruding in the situation or giving himself a role for the sake of a spectacular visual effect or sentimental power. Such distance, coupled with the subject’s subtle state of the mind, makes it difficult to interpret these photos and to connect the images with the captions. The three black-and-white photos at this exhibition, all shot in 1989, featured a young man holding an umbrella, with thick glasses and jagged teeth, people in a heavy snow, and a worker in a railway waiting room with half of his face blocked by the chimney. These subjects, by no means nice-looking, were quite common in Han’s pictures. The implicit psychological tension between the subjects and their background was actually translated into “reality” in these photos. The man with the umbrella and people in the snow were part of a Shehuo scene. For this traditional festival occasion in Shaanxi, hilarious atmosphere should be the ground color. Thanks to the distance from the photographer, these plain and ordinary people added warmth to these photos, and Han, in his turn, did not take advantage of the camera to twist them in a deliberate and harsh way. By contrast to those powerful and fairly inspiring pictures, Han’s photos, focusing on the ordinary and obscure grassroots, burst with more vitality and offered more layers of interpretation.

(Edited by Su Wenxiang, Xu Chongbao, Huang Si, 2015)