Who Are You?

Who Are You? began as an exchange of images with sixteen friends living in different regions of China. I invited them to share photographs from their everyday lives, then selected images that I felt reflected their living conditions and surrounding environments. These separate private fragments were recombined into a single puzzle, over which I printed the question: “Who Are You?”

After the work was completed, the puzzle was randomly divided into sixteen parts. Each part was placed in a separate bag and mailed back to one of the participants together with a postcard of the work. What each person received was not simply an image belonging to them, but a fragment composed of different people, places, and lived experiences. Through the processes of selection, assembly, and redistribution, photographs with clear individual origins gradually lost their original boundaries and entered a shared public image space.

Communication increasingly depends on networks and digital images. We observe the lives of others through social media while continuously selecting and presenting our own. Yet these images can never constitute a complete person. They are only partial records shaped by framing, selection, and arrangement. Our understanding of others is often constructed through these discontinuous visual fragments, which in turn influence our thoughts and actions.

The work transforms the structure of a social network into a physical puzzle that can be dismantled and redistributed. It examines how private images enter public space and how personal identity becomes blurred through viewing, circulation, and recombination. The question in the title is directed not only at the people represented in the photographs, but also at every viewer and participant: when fragments of individual lives continually become part of other people’s visual experience, how do we recognise others, and how do we determine who we are?