Family Portraits – Resemblance and Dissimilarity Humans feel anxious about dissimilarity and feel relieved when they find similarities. From the cave man age, humans have become tense and wary of strangeness. What is ‘dissimilarity’ to humans? On the positive side, it is considered to be something unique or mysterious; on the negative side, it is something strange, weird, grotesque or alien. Living beings bring a child into the world through sexual reproduction. Their offspring may look like their clone, or it may not. The simpler a parent’s genes are, the more its offspring resembles its parent like a clone; the more complex they are, the more the parent and his/her child look different from each other. We often try to find similarities and differences between us and our children. It is a universal aspect of mankind to prefer similarity to dissimilarity. It seems that we, in general, have greater affection for a child who resembles ourselves. Maybe discrimination and aversion are derived from dissimilarity. I believe the reason why the Europeans colonized the African continent, enslaved its people and forced these slaves to migrate to Europe without compunction is because of the differences in physical appearance. In this exhibition, I arrange the face photographs of my family, and compare the faces of parents and their children—a combination of the two people, who have totally different sequences of DNA. I want to explore the resemblance and dissimilarity among the faces of my family—the camera zoomed in to the faces in order to emphasize such aspects—and to observe more objectively the features that I have become familiar with. Wonjin Choi