Chen Zhexiang

Any Resemblance is Coincidental

In the video work Any Resemblance is Coincidental, CHEN Zhexiang mined portraits of real Asian criminals that were abandoned on the Internet. In order to form a database of the portraits, he saved the files under the original names retrieved from the Internet. CHEN used digital facial recognition technology to build a lexicon of the criminals’ facial characteristics in order to analyze them. The artist then implemented the technology to identify whether the images of the real criminals bear any resemblance to characters in Asian crime films. In Any Resemblance is Coincidental the faces of the criminals are presented on screen and categorized by either red or green squares that isolate their facial features to identify them. The red square indicates that the system believes the image to be of a real criminal, while the green square means that it doesn’t match. Any Resemblance is Coincidental demonstrates the historical and cultural links between facial recognition technology, the Internet and criminology. With this work, CHEN problematizes the virtual nature of movies and the Internet.