Taryn Simon's (b. 1975, New York) most extensive exhibition in China to date represents the culmination of four years (2008-2011) of extensive research into 18 bloodlines and their individual stories, which took Simon across the globe. This is Simon's largest exhibition in Asia to date.

In each of the work's eighteen chapters, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Subjects span a wide range of topics and social relations: the titular Indian man whose relatives had him declared dead in official records to inherit his father's land; victims of the Bosnian Genocide, represented by the bones used to identify them; a group of Ukrainian orphans, united by their lack of discernible bloodline; and laboratory-bred rabbits in Australia used to test the efficacy of a virus designed to eliminate their invasive presence. Absent members are represented by blank portraits with captions listing the reason, covering everything from fear of abduction, imprisonment to Dengue Fever.

This exhibition comes to UCCA and to China after a series of shows in major institutions around the globe, including MoMA, MOCA Los Angeles, Tate Modern, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

For more information, please read the "Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII" press release.