Describing the work, Opie says: 'At a formal dinner in China I found myself looking at the amazing array of faces around the table and, on a whim asked them all to pose against the back wall of the dining room, including the waitress. I found myself using a very reduced language to capture both the sameness and individuality of each face. I imposed a strict vertical symmetry (except for the hair) and transferred a set of around 20 marks from one face to the next making slight changes to match each sitter. The result seems to echo traditional portraiture, silhouette or cartoon likenesses and more brutal face recognition technology, emojis and commercial logos. In an attempt to distil these references, I chose to cast the portraits as if they were something like a public monument, a motorway crash barrier and maybe even a tomb stone.