Artist Statement
I am a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, alternative processes, and mixed media. I am interested in the nature of the photographic medium, particularly photography’s capacity to be simultaneously factual and fictitious; forthcoming and withholding; clear and ambiguous. Since 2017, I have been using my own family’s photo archives as source materials for various projects.
The works I submitted in this application are from my ongoing project “Remember Me Like This” that I started in 2017. This project is based on a collection of black and white family photographs that I discovered at my grandmother’s house in China. They were taken between the 1940s and early 1980s, prior to I was born. I rephotographed and printed selected photos from this collection as silver gelatin prints, and hand painted them with ink and gouache. Each in turn becomes a unique piece of painted artwork. The physical manipulations of photographs and the motif of dots obscuring the faces altered the original nature and function of the medium. These family photos are no longer about the individuals captured. They become photography’s poetic moment of truth – symbolic and metaphorical. They demand the viewers to reflect on what we desire to remember and be remembered by.
