Early Evening Light

The early evening sheds the last bit of radiance from daytime. This brief moment before the darkness looms over—the moment of sadness, tenderness and philosophical reflection —is what Hai is trying to preserve in this work. The seemingly casual triptych is actually carefully composed: the extending path in the middle and the benches along the side appear under the darkness of the early evening, drawing the concentration of the audience into afar where the dusk is almost gone. Under the scattered lights shed from dense clouds is the rigid silhouettes of the old men. The rolling clouds and the tilted trees splash a sense of drama and tensity into this stable composition. The repetition and contrast among the three connected photographs, seems echoing a symbolic meaning of this ordinary early evening in the village.