Among the few possessions he left behind, three square-shaped iron boxes full of photographs were discovered. The photographs appear to have been taken before Hans first came to China in the 1980s; there are about a hundred or more of them, taken using a Polaroid camera and without any additional textual notes.

The content of the photographs is light, casual and ordinary, the immediacy and ephemerality of the Polaroids strikes me as being a reflection of Hans’s life: a reverie of light and shade, the form inseparable from its shadow, and gone in the blink of an eye.

China Art Archives and Warehouse is exhibiting a selection of these precious photographs and also publishing a book of them, in memory of our colleague and fellow traveller.