WRITING / PUBLICATION
Texts written within projects, accounts of sustained practice, and subsequent research.
HE FA · AUTHOR’S ESSAY · CHINESE / ENGLISH
From a pinhole camera, collage and portraiture to language, shared rehearsals and film. Six chapters that also question the story they make of this path.
Manuscript supplied 16 September 2026 · six chapters · nine archival images
How a work was first proposed, and how it is read later.
Project accounts sit alongside longer retrospectives and subsequent research. Dates and text types distinguish writing made during a project from later interpretations. Original Chinese texts are marked below.
SIX READING ROUTES
Begin with a concrete question, and move between questions as you read. Six entries connect project accounts, participant writings, public debates and later theoretical research. Each entry preserves the original byline and date and identifies the available language editions.
Go directly to all 44 texts ↓Begin with the 2020 account of photography becoming an encounter between two people. Naming, collaboration and choices about disclosure appear together.
Then read the three filming arrangements proposed in the 2023 recruitment text, where roles, recorded daily life and a public performance enter one another.
Finish with the 2026 close reading, which asks why moving a camera closer to someone does not give it the authority to answer for them.
Start with how Personal Chronicle proposes interviews, editing, project initiation and presentation: concrete steps from telling a story to acting on it.
Continue with the jointly credited text by Lifeng and He Fa. Lifeng’s contribution preserves the initiator’s own voice and uncertainty.
Follow Xu Shuai from participating in the film to initiating Breaking Moon, and see one project opening into another rehearsal.
Enter through this 2021 text on games and recruitment: fictional organizations, voting and a boxing ring turn choices into conditions of participation.
Then follow how The Final Solution proposes a fictional crisis and connects speech in its meetings with written records and further discussion.
Finish with the first part of AGT, written in 2025, where the author looks back on practice and proposes a model of conception, formulation, execution and reception.
Begin with the sixteen days before Cocoon: schedules, working roles, fatigue and a slippery stage bring bodies into view before theory.
Next, read the 2025 book study for its account of responses passing between performers and spectators, with sound and space entering the exchange.
Finish with The Enthroned Gaze, paying particular attention to its questions about historical differences, bodily experience and the limits of a closed theoretical system.
Start with the 2020 Sunday screening rules: a limit of fifteen people, waiting for one another and leaving discussions unrecorded shape the encounter.
Continue through the 2022 account of changing venues, collaborations and separations, and the work sustained in a small office.
Finish with the extended 2024 retrospective, which places space, shared life, organizational tensions and filmmaking within one history of practice.
Follow works back to signed texts, with writing at the time, later reflection and participant accounts identified separately.
Reading connectionIn this 2026 study, He Fa follows close views of eyes, cameras caught on camera and end-credit archives to ask what position proximity and replay give the viewer. The two titles open another route: shifts between self and you lead back to particular bodies, voices and moments of waiting.
Related works: Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You
Reading connectionIn 2024, He Fa revisits the studio’s conversion into a theatre, the move to a small office and cameras entering collaborative rehearsal. From Iceberg to Human Surrender, the size of a room, bodily distance and ways of filming affect one another. This retrospective returns the works to their spaces and collaborations.
Related works: P4 Theater · Iceberg · Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You
Reading connectionXu Shuai connects these works through his involvement in Human Surrender and the production retitled from Burning the Moon to Breaking the Moon. Written before the 2023 performance, He Fa’s account follows changing personnel and rehearsal schedules toward the anticipated 16 December presentation, while the work is still taking shape.
Related works: Breaking the Moon · Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You
Reading connectionThe 2023 announcement links writings by performers, a documentarian and musicians, alongside plans to record the public event for the film. Following these links back from the film reveals how different people prepared for the same gathering. The invitation, their individual voices and the later images remain available together.
Related works: Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You
Reading connectionIn the 2023 recruitment text, He Fa proposes three filming arrangements: a stage long take, following performers into daily life and recording a real public performance. This initial plan shows the film beginning to gather people, assign roles and leave room for the unforeseen, with filming already part of rehearsal and shared time.
Related works: Human Surrender / Shoot Self with You
Reading connectionCo-signed by Yuyu Yumu and He Fa, the article moves from a Personal Chronicle interview to Yumu’s own Thirty-Three Lives proposal. She seeks eight collaborators to write fictional lives spanning more than two thousand years. The person being recorded issues a new invitation, preparing to initiate a shared writing project.
Related works: Personal Chronicle / PHA
Reading connectionThe 2023 Personal Chronicle manifesto connects a long interview, a circulation edit, project initiation and a public presentation through explicit agreements. Recounting a past becomes a starting point for inviting others into future action. The rules also address when recording begins and ends, and how relationships within creation remain distinct from daily life.
Related works: Personal Chronicle / PHA · P4 Theater
Reading connectionLooking back in 2022, He Fa returns to Shadow Counterpoint and Hamlet’s Mirror, then recounts a separation between collaborators and the restart at 510. A few chairs, two desks and a small office provided conditions for work such as Iceberg to continue. Moves, collaborations and repeated beginnings connect the productions.
Related works: P4 Theater · Shadow Counterpoint · Hamlet’s Mirror · Iceberg
Reading connectionThe 2021 3P call invites observers into the making of Kill the Rose. It proposes following the process, publishing during the production period and exhibiting alongside the performance, while leaving ownership for members to discuss. Looking, performing and recording alternate within these rules as observers prepare to make their judgments public.
Related works: Kill the Rose: 3P—Watching, Performing, Recording
Reading connectionFrom Shixiang’s photographic research to open-call productions such as Cocoon, He Fa’s 2021 account describes the labour of providing space, practical support and temporary teams. He also acknowledges how his own judgments can redirect work and bring compromise or hurt. The theatre’s aspirations sit beside the decisions required to sustain it.
Related works: P4 Theater · Shixiang · Cocoon
Reading connectionWritten before Cocoon’s 2020 performance, this account moves from scheduling into continuous rehearsal. Falls, fatigue, lateness and mutual judgments share the same days as performing, lighting, documentation and publicity. Alongside stage images, the article records how bodies bear the work of production and how many people prepare a single performance.
Related works: Cocoon
Reading connectionWhat Is Shixiang? looks back from 2020 at Shanshui and Central, then turns to photographic roles, the naming of I, See, You and publication choices. It proposes eight and a half encounters and imagines a museum holding a thousand people’s traces: retaining images while making room for another meeting.
Reading P4 through the relations between space, shared learning and documentation. A sustained account of ideas and work, best read after visiting the P4 project.
Public online version in Chinese. Recorded separately from the Renwen Zhongguo 2025, issue 1 publication listed in the artist’s CV.
Related practice: P4 Theater →A contemporary account of the project’s beginnings, division of work and eight-and-a-half-act structure. It explains why photographing and viewing alternate.
Related work: Shixiang →A return to a decade of practice. Read with the chronology to follow the changing spaces, people and records beyond any single performance.
Read alongside the chronology →Seven reading themes begin with original installation recordings and photographs, distinguishing connection, sharing, viewing position and participation. Includes an online guide and an editable Chinese research draft.
Download Chinese working draft · DOCX ↓PUBLICATION COLLABORATION
The magazine’s public project account lists Fa He as a Founding Contributor. N/A grew from a San Francisco course concerned with art, technology, rhetoric and power. This credit is distinct from its named editor and publisher.
FURTHER READING
The P4 archive preserves performances and project writing by year; the research library offers thematic reading; the English journal continues the work across languages.
44 / SIGNED TEXTS
This index follows He Fa’s byline in public articles and retains joint authorship. Existing English titles and terms follow the source; other titles are translated here. Links open the original Chinese texts.
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发、史佳廷 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
p4剧场何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
余裕雨木&何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发&恽剑辉 · Original Chinese text
立风&何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
何发 · Original Chinese text
BEYOND THE PAGE
Other ways to watch and read through this work.
Site interface · September 2026
A book by He Fa · online reading
Beginning with P4 Theater, Human Surrender and shared practice, the book asks how roles, images and interpretation reorganise life.
book.p4theater.cn · Chinese text
Site interface · September 2026
P4 research · online book
A history of media from divination and ritual to images, feedback and language models, tracing how people are reshaped by forms they create.
loop.p4theater.top · Chinese text
Site interface · September 2026
Film extension · public reading
A multi-volume reading space extending questions from the film into discussions of roles, relationships and viewing.
canon.p4theater.cn · Chinese text
Site interface · September 2026
P4 research · cinema & philosophy
Read movement, time, sound and bodies through concepts, films, shots and primary texts: research material to return to alongside filmmaking.
deleuze.p4theater.cn · Chinese / English
Site interface · September 2026
Research library
Find material through works, documents and research entries, in dialogue with the artist’s portfolio.
b.p4theater.cn · Chinese materials