The Wind of Yesterday（2024）
Installation
Variable size
Plastic bags, Electric fans, Ink, Silk thread, Wood
This work stems from the artist's contemplation of the tension between intimate family memories and the great changes of times. The kernel of the work is an old electric fan that witnessed the marriage of the artist's parents. Its breeze continuously blows a thin plastic bag, which is printed with the image of a demolished window from the artist's childhood house. It is a fragment of home drawn from an old photo.
The still-operational old fan breathes life into this fragile "home" through its dynamic movement. However, the plastic bag with the window image remains perpetually lightweight, unable to settle. The plastic bag, which is a kind of daily, disposable, and fragile material, here becomes a temporary "container" for the image of a lost home. The window image upon it, a remnant of what was once a stable physical space and spiritual garden, appears unstable and distorted due to the bag's lightness and the wind's motion. This instability visually mirrors the non-fixity of memory itself, which is not an unchanging archive but a dynamic process, continually diluted, distorted, or intensified within the tension between recollection and oblivion.
Through this work, the artist attempts to capture the loss and search for individual experience amidst rapid urbanization. Under the grand narrative of "development", countless physical spaces bearing individual and community histories are swiftly erased. When a physical space becomes inexistent, how does a flight of memories find their footholds? As the past is constantly re-overwritten, how do we grasp these elapsing memories?