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Hai Bo 2006

September 7, 2006- October 14, 2006

Reception: September 20, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Hai Bo

Max Protetch

511 W 22nd St

Max Protetch is pleased to announce Beijing-based photographer Hai Bo’s second solo exhibition in the United States. The artist will be present for the opening of the exhibition and will be the inaugural lecturer in the visiting artist program at the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art. Hai Bo’s work has previously been exhibited in the 2001 Venice Biennale; the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial; the International Center of Photography’s landmark exhibition

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China; and Ralph Rugoff’s traveling exhibition Shoot the Family. Hai Bo’s exhibition at Max Protetch 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.”

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

Location   Gallery Max Protetch Address 511 W 22nd St New York (Chelsea) NY, 10011 United States Phone 212-633-6999 Fax 212-691-4342 Hours Tue-Sat 10-6

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