Hamlet’s Mirror

Taking the play apart

He Fa breaks Hamlet into short fragments. As he enters its roles, the image of a character is also separated from the body. Performance within a screen, images projected onto a person and the live performer’s movements form displaced relationships. The viewer encounters Hamlet in several times and positions.

Projection and performance

The original statement identifies the large screen, projection and performer as three interacting elements. Information originates in the performer’s own actions, then returns to the body through images. Occlusion, reflection and superimposition unsettle the division between a subject and its projected double. The work also carries questions of the whole and its parts from the earlier photographs into the time and space of performance.

Acts, sketches and moving images

The surviving sketches develop bodies, stairs, rooms and superimposed figures. English act sheets identify Walking, Father’s Ghost, Finding Mother, Asking, Mice Running, Manipulation, Ophelia Going Mad, and Hamlet and I. Sketches and act documentation are presented in portfolio order for comparison.

FakingAosome and the original version

The CAFAM proposal jointly signed by He Fa and Zhang Aoshuang on 5 September 2016 explicitly identifies Hamlet’s Mirror as the first project of FakingAosome, the group they founded in 2015. It records its development from June to December 2015 at P4 Theater in Beijing. This directly signed document supplies collaborative credits that were not detailed in the earlier individual portfolio.

From an excerpt to longer event recordings

Two “HAMLET’S MIRROR” exports in the working archive both run 3 minutes, 48.08 seconds, at 640 × 360 and 960 × 540 respectively. Four aligned visual samples correspond, and their complete decoded audio produces the same checksum. The records therefore connect them as different exports of the same excerpt.

Two longer files offer a different scale of viewing. “1-1-1我对面.mov” runs 34 minutes, 54.509 seconds and records figures and projections from one direction. “哈姆雷特的镜子1.mp4” runs 37 minutes, 39.4 seconds; sampled frames include a cubic space, projected text, images and bodies. These are the durations of the surviving files and do not establish that a performance was recorded in full.

Source documents: HAMLET'S MIRROR.mov; HAMLET'S MIRROR.mp4; 1-1-1我对面.mov; 哈姆雷特的镜子1.mp4.

The body as an interruption of the image

In Walking, body and shadow fall out of alignment; in Manipulation, clothing becomes a surface for coloured projection. Relations between roles are also formed through occlusion, projection and changes of scale. Earlier collages compressed different moments into one surface; here a body can interrupt an image and be covered by it again. The act-by-act documentation makes this distinction visible, though static documents cannot establish the rhythm of an entire performance or its audience’s response.

Archive reading, 30 September 2026 · Site editorial interpretation, not an artist’s statement. Sources: He Fa Portfolio (PDF), pp. 36–39; the “Theory Theatre” proposal, pp. 1 and 3. English is an editorial translation; document titles are translated where needed.