Unseen Friends / 未曾谋面的朋友
Thanks to the help of Taowen Pan, Yoriko, Antinous, Betterxin, Chan Guo, Zhishu, Tur Chen, Di Wu, Amiliar F and so on...
I have always been observant, trying to discover out-of-the-ordinary in ordinary life, and one particular phenomenon has caught my attention: the social media that most of us grown addicted to, is nothing but social. Many friends that we chat with online only exist on our contact lists, and we have never met them in person. It seems that when we open our computers, it’s our doors we shut. This may be only a small part of the surreality of modern life.
For this project, Me and My Unseen Friends, I first reconnected with my “contact-list friends”, asked for some of their photos. I then found the same settings where these photos were taken, took a picture of myself in the same place, and finally photographed myself into their photos. The result is an illusion that we have met before, yet the unavoidable mismatch betrays a fictional and synthetic touch and the estrangement between us.
/ 我总是很关注当下人们的生活，就如我们都离不开的社交网络，它让我们的身边多了这样一种朋友：虚拟世界里聊得不错，却仅仅只是通讯录里的一员，一次面也没有见过。我想这种现象只是充满超现实的当代现实生活的一个很小的方面。
/ 我的这个项目，是通过和这样的朋友重新取得联系，寻找他们的照片，并自己回到他们过去的照片里的同一个空间，努力猜测和回顾当时的拍摄情景，并重新在同样的位置自己拍摄自己，最后把自己合成进他们过去的影像里，就好像我们曾经遇见过，但不可避免的错位感又让人容易感受到这是虚构的，并且感受到我们之间的陌生。