The photographs of Family Tree document Zhang Huan’s face over the course of a single day—from dawn to dusk—during a performance in which three calligraphers painted characters onto the artist’s face. Zhang dictated a variety of narratives to the calligraphers, including well-known myths, accounts of his family, and texts related to the nature of fate and divining a person’s future from their physical features. With each successive calligraphic layer, Zhang’s face became further obscured in black ink, and the individual characters became increasingly illegible, until his face was fully covered in a layer of black ink comprised of the recited cultural texts and personal narratives.