I

Becoming a mountain

In I (2012), the photographer becomes the terrain being photographed. A macro lens attends to skin, facial features and hair, piece by piece; these close observations are assembled as a self-portrait measuring 320 × 320 cm. The grid divides a recognizable face and retains traces of its photographic construction.

Between near and far

From a distance, the image remains a face. At close range, it can be read as a surface composed of many details. A comparable shift occurs in the contemporaneous Shanshui works: both a landscape and a body invite repeated movement between the whole and its parts.

From skin detail back to human scale

After the full image, the portfolio places a macro photograph of skin beside an installation portrait. Pores, fine hair and skin become terrain; a person standing before the work restores its scale of 320 × 320 cm. The two distances correspond to the artist’s statement that “I became the mountain.”

Records from 2010 and 2012

The same portrait also appears in the 2010 Large Portraits portfolio as Portrait — He Fa: a vertical image without a grid, recorded at 2310 × 2430 mm. In the 2012 portfolio, I has a square, gridded composition and is listed at 320 × 320 cm. Dates and dimensions are retained from their respective documents.

My Face and the About Tangle process materials

Page 18 of the multi-artist Tangle document presents this self-portrait as “He Fa · My Face” with a bilingual statement. He Fa’s separate 23-page About Tangle presentation begins with photographs of Mount Siguniang and its rocks, moves into close observations of mouth, forehead, eyes, nose and ear, then returns to the complete face.

Page 17 gives the full portrait as 273 × 287 cm; pages 19 and 20 show details of skin and hair labelled at original size. Alongside the 231 × 243 cm record in the 2010 portfolio and the 320 × 320 cm gridded version of I from 2012, this preserves different documented dimensions and compositions for the portrait materials.

Source documents: 纠结（多艺术家文献）; 关于纠结——何发.

The grid and viewing distance

The heavy black grid becomes visible before the texture of the skin. It divides the face into stable regions and makes the person an object of inspection, cell by cell. At close range, pores, hair and reflected light can briefly displace recognition. Beside the ungridded portrait version, the change concerns more than scale: the frame makes the organization of looking part of the image.

Archive reading, 30 September 2026 · Site editorial interpretation, not an artist’s statement. Sources: Large Portraits — Works by He Fa, pp. 2–5; He Fa Portfolio (PDF), p. 2; the Struggle catalogue, p. 18. English is an editorial translation; document titles are translated where needed.