Hai Bo expressed his artistic understanding and creating ideas through photography. He selected definite spatial positions as base points, and introduced a long-time span, presenting an inevitable change of times, history and even heart of individuals.

Middle School Times photographed a picture of Hai Bo’s friends, who were also his classmates of his youth while they spent a carefree time together. As the artist was going to transfer to another school, they took this old photo together as a memorial to each other. Years later, the artist found them again and took a new photo with the same background and the same position as the original one. However, the completely different dress and appearance of the characters shows the sincerest mark left by times and emotional flow of ordinary people under the great historical changes of the times and society.

There is always a lingering sadness in Hai Bo’s works, which permeates to and touches others. By comparing the old with the new, he presents a strong visual shock, the cruelty of time and the fragility of life making the viewers sigh. With silent and simple means, the artist powerfully conveys the hidden pain of growth and the confusion about the passage of time, and also shows his compassionate humanistic feelings.

Lifelong Memorial is a wedding anniversary photo of Hai Bo’s parents. At an early age, Hai Bo often looked at this photo of his parents. When he grew up, he experienced more yet became more confused. He didn’t know whether the “lifetime memorial” in marriage was a comedy or a tragedy. Therefore, Hai Bo asked his parents to pose in the same way as in the original photo again, and recaptured the emotional traces reflected by his parents’ marriage for decades through the changes of their expressions and costumes.

This juxtaposition serves as a bridge connecting the broken times, which not only touches the memories of the past, but also closely relates to reality. Hai Bo wants to show a “change” of “history” with a kind of “invariability”. It is full of a sort of personal Utopian behavior and imagination. He seeks to serenely show the invincible power of time and his personal thinking on the essence of time and life in an unpretentious style.

(Edited by Li Hanning & Yang Zhige, 2021)