Portrait Chinois de C.B. is a duo of two c-prints in an edition of 50. Each work looks like a photograph culled from a bureaucratic document—a passport, for example. But closer inspection reveals that, rather than depicting a specific person, the images are composed of three strips that have been cut out of photographs of three different people. This is a variation on the game cadavre exquis (“exquisite corpses”), popular among Surrealist artists in France during the early 20th century, wherein three participants each draw a different section of a person that are then put together to improvise a hodgepodge character. By using photographs of real people in a similar fashion, and especially because of the subjects’ somber expressions, Christian Boltanski’s variation on the game achieves uncertain emotional resonance.