A focus on conceptual repetition

In general, photography makes a record of the “real world,” but Li Hao aims to break down our pre-existing notions about photography as a medium of realistic reproduction. Although his works are mostly photographic, he also integrates concepts from other artistic realms. We can thus come to suppose in viewing his work that photo­graphy has never had its own essential character (documenting reality and so forth), but rather that photography’s basic nature lies in the idea of “dynamic expansion”—an ability to integrate with other artistic realms and not to be confined by its own documentarian character.

Li Hao’s works feature connections to avant-garde performance art and audio-visual art. Full of jarring repetitions and fragmentations, many of his works feature a strong sense of unpredictability (magical sensations from the realm of avant-garde art). “Repetition” forms the central axis of his oeuvre. From his early collection Le Mécanisme Répétitif to the recent highly experimental works of R. A./E./O. M., one can see the concept of repetition constantly being highlighted.

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Repetitive frameworks

In Li Hao’s earliest collection, Le Mécanisme Répétitif (“The Repetitive Mechanism”), we can see the extensive use of multiple exposures in his images of street scenes, where we are jolted time and again by the overlaying of strong aesthetic forms and spaces. Yet Le Mécanisme Répétitif is not merely a demonstration of aesthetic forms. What is more important is his “behavioral process” in creating these photographs. He notes that his behavior is akin to punching time cards at work: “Every day at the same time, I return to the same location and use the same mode of composition, limiting myself to only pressing the shutter once each time. I thus gather these images on the same negative.”  In other words, these repetitions are not so much photographic forms as records of the process by which Li Hao uses his own body to put his aesthetic conceptions into practice.   

What’s more, these overlaid images are of public facilities or ­markets, the fruits of capitalist organization and places where people constantly engage in repetitive habitual behavi­ors. Although we may think we have autonomy over our choices in the market, in fact we passively submit to the mechanisms found within the operational framework of these “planned” public spaces day after day, constantly repeating actions inside them without being truly conscious of them. Yet Li Hao is not one-sidedly critical of repetitive daily habits that are the result of capitalist organization; he is more concerned with laying bare the operating mechanisms of this framework, to awaken viewers to their own repetitive daily behaviors and move them to actively create new and different possibilities.

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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.

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