EYEMAZING GALLERY 178
Han Lei
© Han Lei – The naked MaLan, 2008, C print, 180 x 216 cm
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Theater of Ordinary Life’s
Small-Time, Bit-Part Players
For Chinese contemporary artist Han Lei, the act of
photographing the world is his way of engaging it,
processing it, filtering it and digesting it. By finding
the coexistence of the ugly and the poignant, the
common and the unique , in a single frame, he captures multi-layered subtleties rarely found in single
images. While his areas of interest are diverse and his
creative endeavours follow no single libretto, there is
nevertheless a distinctive aesthetic and sensitivity to
the inner states and emotional complexity of his subjects that characterises his body of work.
Born in 1967 in the ancient city of Kaifeng, in China’s
Henan province, Han Lei comes from a family that
encouraged him to pursue a career in art, long before
there was any market for art within the People’s
Republic of China. His father was a solar physicist and
his mother was a worker, but they shared a love of
the arts and supported their son’s artistic endeavours
since he was a child.
While Han Lei’s art practice employs many diverse
media, including sculpture, installation and painting,
photography has been the most consistent and pervasive vehicle for the creation of his acclaimed body
of works. He was one of the early contemporary
artists in China to make a name for himself with a
camera, and his work has been shown worldwide at
prestigious venues including the Kwangju Museum of
Art (2007), the Guangzhou Museum of Art (2005)
Lianzhou
Photography
Festival
(2006,
2007),
Guangzhou Photography Biennial (2005), Rome Photography Festival (2003, 2004, 2005), Prague International Museum (2003), as well as Pingyao Photography Festival (2001), and he has had numerous solo
exhibitions in galleries in Europe, Asia and the US.
“I guess the main thing about my work,” recounts
Han Lei, describing his creative process, “is that each
piece is very specific to the individual I am shooting.
Also specific to my particular way of looking at and
making sense of the world around me, is attention to
certain kinds of details, each person’s view is different.
The things that draw me in and compel me to take pictures are things that also sort of repel me once I’ve
taken the picture. I love the process of taking the
photograph, but afterwards if I look at the pictures too
much, they make me feel very uncomfortable; I don’t
actually like looking at my own work. I can’t bring
myself to make images that uncritically reflect the
dominant aesthetic, so there are always traces of discomfort there alongside the sentimental, the nostalgic
elements that exist simultaneously in the images.”
In one of his seminal works, Pan Jinlian Who Performs
a Rabbit Girl (2007), Han Lei offers a clear glimpse
into the inner workings of his creative process.
Uninterested in traditional notions of beauty, his
works often veer away from not only the putatively
“exceptional” in society, but also even away from that
which is considered “normal.” It is the small-time, bitpart players that captivate Han Lei’s imagination and
animate his lens – the same sorts of people who make
up most of the population and whose distinctiveness
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© Han Lei – Ears of Monkey and Ears of Strawberry, 2008, C print, 180 x 216 cm
© Han Lei – Panjinglian who performs as a rabbit girl, 2008, C print, 180 x 216 cm
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is elided by homogenising ideas of the “normal” and
“average” blank qualities such people are thought to
possess. In Han Lei’s world, the truly normal is always
just a bit “warped.” He is drawn, almost compulsively,
to the solidly banal and mediocre, mildly substandard,
slightly defective, not-quite-up-to-par, but never overthe-top freakish, fantastical or otherworldly. These are
people who are just “off” enough for their ordinariness to become uniqueness and their imperfections to
become their allure.
This is the creative impulse informing Han Lei’s creation of the arresting, unsettling image of an overweight, surly woman playing Pan Jinlian, who in turn
is playing a “rabbit girl”– an icon of libidinous fervor.
Pan Jinlian is a controversial and meaning-saturated
female character in Chinese literature, and has
become the site of much discussion about the changing fate of women in contemporary China.
In the legendary work of Chinese fiction, Water
Margin (Outlaws of the Marsh), written in the 16th
century, Pan Jinlian is just one such small-time, bitpart, side character who has captured the collective
imagination. She is a woman of exceptional beauty
sent by her father to work as a servant in a rich man’s
home, only to be sexually harassed by her benefactorboss and then forced into a marriage with a nasty,
dwarfish, toadstool of a man who makes a living selling cow dung, as revenge for spurning the benefactor-boss’ advances, so that society comes to see her
mismatched marriage like a flower stuck in a cow
patty. When Pan Jinlian is tricked into an affair, blackmailed, and then found out by her husband’s outlaw
brother, she is murdered by her husband’s brother and
condemned as a shameless adulteress. Only in recent
years has society begun to re-evaluate Pan Jinlian as a
symbol and rethink the patriarchal model of morality
that her demise represents.
Instead of making his Pan Jinlian a lissome beauty,
Han Lei went to great lengths to locate the particular
model he chose for this work – a corpulent woman
whose aggressive, defiant gaze is anything but
coquettish or come-hither. Her carriage and demeanor indicate a psychological state at odds with that of
the traditional woman, who submits without complaint to cruel fate. While the model is not ugly, she is
in no way attractive by today’s popular aesthetic. In
describing his thinking about this project, Han Lei
recounts how he took “this person who is imperfect
by society’s standards and elongated her legs to make
her better fit that idea of beauty,” but did so in a way
that leaves the traces of the visual intervention fully
visible. We’re not really fooled by the elongation, nor
does he expect us to be. We know she’s not perfect,
that she’s been tampered with. For Han Lei, this is a
sort of sardonic move that mocks those dominant
standards of beauty and normalcy as unreal and unattainable, rather than mocking the woman who is
deemed flawed in light of those standards.
Like Pan Jinlian as Rabbit Girl, Han Lei’s other tri-panel
works Naked Malan (2008) and Ears of Monkey and
Ears of Strawberry (2008) extend this train of thought
and take his interest in the visual expression of “shan-
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© Han Lei – Three standing nude women, 2007, C print, 150 x 120 cm
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© Han Lei – A girl in the hair salon, 2006, C print, 150 x 120 cm
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© Han Lei – A young man from Chifeng, 2006, C print, 150 x 85 cm
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zhai” culture in China, to a new level. “Shanzhai” lit-
not endearing, and yet just unsettling enough to pre-
Once again, it is that flawed, off-kilter feeling that
erally means “mountain village,” but in current slang,
vent us from taking a cozy, condescending higher
gives this image an intimacy and immediacy that
it connotes something more like a hick, backwoods,
ground, because they are closer to us than we might
works as a counterpoint to the strangeness.
home-hacked, kludge culture of knock-offs that have
like to think.
a distinctly low-culture flavor – tacky, unstylish, cheap
Such strangeness is amplified in Han Lei’s many works
and possibly poorly-made, vulgar and probably a little
A Girl in the Hair Salon (2006) was shot after Han Lei
featuring folk actors and opera singers as his photo-
out of style, though striving mightily to be the oppo-
passed a typical Chinese brothel disguised as a hair
graphic subjects. This is taken to an extreme in the
site of all this. The image of the short, stocky woman,
salon and saw a corpulent beauty in the picture win-
striking images in his 13 Fictional Methods of Civil
sprawled ungainly on a shoddy lamé cloth, wearing
dow. He was drawn to the “visual texture” of her fat
Punishment series. Han Lei recounts the story behind
tacky purple stockings and cheesy red boots, with lit-
body. When he approached the women, of course
this series: “These people come from a family in
tle stuffed toys and knickknacks lying about in an
she assumed he wanted sex, and when he explained
Chisha town, in Shaanxi province, who have tradition-
attempt to express “cuteness,” is a “shanzai” knock-
he just wanted to take her picture, she had trouble
ally performed these roles each year during the
off version of Goya’s famous Nude Maja (1797-1800).
believing that he only wanted to shoot her portrait,
Chinese New Year. They are acting out roles of invet-
Yet it would be wrong to say that Han Lei is mocking
and not take pornographic pictures of her. He per-
erate “bad guys” who must be killed off because of
the girl in the picture, or mocking her “type,” for
suaded her to trust him, but during the shoot in the
their bad morals at the start of each New Year. This
there is an undertone of tenderness – faint enough to
back room, she was very nervous that the Ji-Mama
sort of ritualised performance is a dying art and the
avoid becoming cloying – in the image. It is not the
would find out she was not having sex, but instead
young people have no interest in carrying on their
coltish supermodels that society fetishises who inter-
taking pictures. The photograph that resulted is one
local culture, while the older people who do the act-
est Han Lei, but those who don’t make the cut no
of his best. It penetrates deeply into the complex psy-
ing are all working in the city away from their homes
matter how hard they try. “In this vein,” Han Lei
chological state of the subject, revealing all at once
for most of the year. So the only time I could shoot
explains, “I created a low-class scene with ugly, tacky
several layers of her face – the flirtatious role of her
them, and preserve these fading icons, was during
cloth, an unattractive woman, and cheesy props
profession, the distrust she had for the photographer,
the Spring Festival when they come home for a short
because really, the whole society is actually a lot like
the anxiety of being asked to perform out of the usual
visit. I went to their town with a 4 x 5 medium-format
this. Bad taste, vulgar, poor-quality, yes, but also very
context of her profession, the fear of being discovered
camera and tried to get their portraits. The actors
real and exceedingly common.”
by her boss and being reprimanded, and more.
were impatient and didn’t want to cooperate. Maybe
There is a certain poignancy in these details that Han
For Three Standing Nude Women (2007), as with Pan
They didn’t give me much time, and local hooligans
Lei finds compelling, and he seeks to illuminate that
Jinlian as Rabbit Girl, Han Lei had a scout search high
kept harassing me, bumping into the camera on pur-
in a subtle way with his staged scenes. Likewise, with
and low to find the perfect models for this shot. He
pose while I was trying to get a shot. I finally left
Ears of Monkey and Ears of Strawberry (2008), we
had a very clear idea of what he was looking for –
unsure whether I had gotten even a single decent
see the same attention to typical details, like the silly
three women whose bodies were extremely similar,
frame.”
earmuffs shaped like strawberries or monkey faces.
and whose weight and proportions harkened back to
“I am always collecting these kinds of weird, cheap,
an aesthetic of a distant era. He shot them in a set-
tacky things that are so common in our society,” he
ting much like the old photography studios of days
relates. “They’re totally classic if you know what I
gone-by, with a cheap, opulent cloth as a backdrop,
mean, because they capture that particular quality
bunny ears on their heads and fuzzy panda slippers
and second-rate aesthetic that is so pervasive here.”
on their feet and then leeched the colour out of the
Gallery:
they were out of the habit, out of character, already.
TEXT BY MAYA KÓVSKAYA
© All pictures: Han Lei
image to achieve a low-saturation effect, like that in
Han Jiyun Contemporary Spacy, Beijing
In many other works, we see a similar preoccupation
Pan Jinlian as Rabbit Girl that gave him the feeling of
www.hanjiyun.com
with images of scenes and people that are just a bit
another time, already far from us. The whole effect is
“off,” imperfect, banal, but nonetheless intriguing if
unsettling, vaguely humorous, and gently twisted.
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© Han Lei – Flying Fish, 2009, C print, 150 x 120 cm
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