The Nightmare of Felice Beato, 2025

In 1860, during the Second Opium War launched by the British and French allied forces, photographer Felice Beato took the famous photograph After the Capture of the Taku Forts (1860). As scholar Claire Roberts has revealed in the book of Photography and China, Beato rearranged the positions of the corpses to achieve a perfect composition.

The artist reconstructs this war scene through staged settings but removed the corpses, leaving behind a ghostly scene. Beato had moved the bodies during the day to achieve his composition. The artist imagines such rationalized violence returning in the silence of nightmares: In unseen places, those who manufacture violent spectacles encounter violent recoiling.