People Who Look Like Me

People Who Look Like Me began with images repeatedly sent to me by friends. From time to time, they would come across a person—online or in everyday life—and send me a photograph saying, “This person looks just like you.” At first, it seemed like a private joke, but as more and more of these images accumulated, I began to collect and organise them more seriously.

The images come from very different contexts. Some depict physicists, some are Taobao models or actors, while others appear in wanted notices or reward posters for criminal suspects. These unrelated individuals are brought together because of a perceived resemblance in facial features, expression, or general appearance. Here, likeness is not a measurable fact, but a subjective, unstable, and shifting judgement.

I place these photographs together and record the professions and social roles associated with each person. As the material accumulated, I began to realise that these so-called lookalikes form a set of projected doubles. They occupy entirely different social positions and life trajectories, yet are temporarily drawn into relation with me through a few visual similarities.

The work does not try to prove who truly resembles me. Instead, it treats resemblance itself as a way of seeing. A person’s face is never entirely stable in the eyes of others; it is constantly linked to memory, experience, and stereotype. By gathering these lookalikes, the project considers how identity can be fragmented, replicated, and misrecognised in the age of images, and how a person repeatedly encounters versions of themselves through the gaze of others.