Beijing Project n.20 Ren Bo 任波

From the artist’s notes: “The video is about portraits of everyone who works in the factory. Each face is filmed like an ID photo. The negative image is a metaphor: here each person’s identity is overlooked, and what remains, or appears, is only the individual features of the person portrayed.

“Everyone is unique; we each have an individuality that cannot be replaced. Society wants us to give up being individuals and teaches us a personality instead – and ‘personality’ comes from persona, which means mask. Society gives us a false idea of who we are. Yet each of us is one of a kind, and searching for our uniqueness is a great, exhilarating adventure.

“Joining the portraits with the products does not so much materialise the soul as give the material a soul.”

Materials: two screens and two Bernard products. Filmed in early November 2013, at the end of autumn.