Photographs taken while hiking are ordered by JPEG file size, allowing sky and ground to emerge from a digital sequence.
Cocktail, 2013. Image from the artist’s portfolio.
Artist
He Fa
Date
2013
Medium
Archival inkjet print
Dimensions
180 × 120 cm; 180 × 100 cm (two further works)
Complete chapter contents
The “weight” of a photograph
Cocktail orders photographs according to the size of their compressed JPEG files. Images made in the mountains become files, then gather through sorting. The artist describes this as “settling or floating”: digital files appear to acquire material weight, and an arrangement of sky and ground emerges from their order.
Three images
The portfolio records three works titled Cocktail, all dated 2013. They share a procedure while forming different distributions of colour and image. They are presented here in portfolio order with their respective dimensions; no new numbers are added to the original titles.
Ordering files, reading a landscape
The three portfolio pages retain different degrees of separation between sky and ground: page 8 has a clearer blue-grey upper and green lower field; green and dark areas spread more widely on page 9; on page 10, a finer grid shifts from blue-black to brown-green. Small photographs remain legible as thumbnail views while forming bands of colour at a larger scale. Sorting supplies an arrangement; reading it as landscape also depends on habits of recognizing sky and land.
Archive reading, 30 September 2026 · Site editorial interpretation, not an artist’s statement. Sources: He Fa Portfolio (PDF), pp. 8–10. English is an editorial translation; document titles are translated where needed.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT / PORTFOLIO
Photographs taken while hiking are arranged according to their file sizes after JPEG compression. The photographs seem to acquire a virtual weight, like materials in the real world, and begin to settle or float. Sky and earth emerge naturally.
Translated from the artist’s Chinese portfolio statement.
Prepared from page 8 of the artist’s retained portfolio, He Fa Portfolio 3. Chinese titles follow the source; English titles are translations for this site unless already given in English. Images retain their full composition. Dimensions refer to the version listed in that portfolio.
In Cocktail, compressed file size enters the ordering process. Images may become neighbours through an unexpected kind of order.
Web-image reading experiment: these six complete artwork images are ordered by their current web-file sizes or mean brightness. This does not reconstruct the JPEG-photo ordering of the 2013 works or alter the originals.
File size is the actual byte count of each current WebP file. Brightness is the arithmetic mean of its pixels after conversion to 8-bit grayscale (0–255), not a physical luminance measurement. Both orders ascend; ties preserve initial order. Sample numbers remain fixed.
CLOSE READING / 2026 CURATORIAL INTERPRETATION
Cocktail
What landscape appears when file size sets the order?
Cocktail brings a usually hidden technical property forward. A photograph depicts something and occupies a number of bytes. That value depends on image information and compression conditions; it is not the actual weight of a natural scene. Once assigned an ordering task, however, it determines which photographs become neighbours. A machine-readable difference becomes a visual difference that viewers can read as sky, ground, settling or floating.
The procedure hands part of composition to a rule without removing the author. The selected photographs, compression settings and mapping from order to surface can all affect the outcome. The surviving statement does not specify those parameters, and a presentation should preserve that gap. The work opens a question about how judgment is delegated: instead of asking which photograph best resembles a landscape, one invents a condition and then looks at what it produces.
The limits of this reading
The original algorithm has not been established as reproducible. “Virtual weight” is the artist’s metaphor, not physical mass.
Cocktail orders photographs by file size; P4 Screenings rotates selections through four themes. Both establish ordering conditions, but one forms a static image while the other also lets participants propose their own moving images.
2013 / Archival inkjet print 2020 / Screenings, collective discussion and an ongoing participatory practice
The portfolio statement explicitly makes JPEG file size the sorting criterion and describes settling and floating; numerical sorting is not equated with judgement of people.
Cocktail lets file values determine position; Final Solution uses questioning and votes to decide which characters remain. Both delegate judgments to procedures, but ordering images and producing consequences for performers cannot be treated as equivalent.
2013 / Archival inkjet print 2021 / Participatory theatre, a deliberation game and process documentation
The portfolio statement explicitly makes JPEG file size the sorting criterion and describes settling and floating; numerical sorting is not equated with judgement of people.
The May 2021 call and He Fa’s July account document questioning, voting, character departure and transcription with reflection; version differences remain explicit.
Shanshui reassembles views gathered through climbing; Cocktail lets JPEG file size determine adjacency. Both construct a whole from many photographs, but their arrangements refer respectively to an experience of looking and a technical value.
The statement on defence page 7 describes an experiment with 1,025 Siguniang photographs, combining different viewpoints as traces of walking; that number is not generalized to every work.
The portfolio statement explicitly makes JPEG file size the sorting criterion and describes settling and floating; numerical sorting is not equated with judgement of people.
Cocktail lets JPEG file size determine which photographs become neighbours; Fafalish makes one transcription the input for another conversion. Both delegate part of a judgment, while ordering photographs and repeatedly changing sounds and meanings remain distinct operations.
The CCA exhibition statement supplies six transformations: Chinese poetry, literal English translation, accented reading, pinyin transcription, Chinese rewriting and machine translation into English.
The portfolio statement explicitly makes JPEG file size the sorting criterion and describes settling and floating; numerical sorting is not equated with judgement of people.
