Vague abstractions of memory
The thoughts above about repetition extend to his experimental book R. A./E./O. M. But here his works move beyond repetitive public mechanisms to focus more on the modes by which our memory operates. In addition to examining the “repetitive mechanisms” of the public spaces explored in his earlier works, Li Hao also makes ample use of his own family photographs, which he experimentally manipulates.
In terms of the private material in R. A./E./O. M., we can see how Li Hao reprints his family photos time and again, repeatedly overlaying them in the book (where the photographs also gradually move from being clear to being indistinct). What’s more, we also can gain a sense of how photographs become abstractions. It is precisely this method of abstraction and uncovering that both allows the photographs to leave the realm of “making records of reality” and makes observers conscious of the inherent “materiality” of photographs. They thus can move from “seeing a recorded image of reality” to “seeing how these individual images themselves ‘perform.’”
Attempting to escape from the fixed rules of photography as a medium for recording reality, Li falls in love with activating the concept of repetition. Le Mécanisme Répétitif takes us into the normative mechanisms of public spaces, whereas the experimental R. A./E./O. M. combines the realms of public and private memories. Li Hao does not regard photographs as vessels of reality. Rather, he is concerned about what the photographs themselves represent. Via “self-intervention,” he plays extensively with the material of these photographs (through repetitions, blurring, scratching, damaging, fragmenting and so forth). Furthermore, in his works, we become conscious of the disintegration of customary modes of photographic observation and awaken to multifaceted possibilities for photography to resonate with other fields.