In this project, I want to investigate how my personal experience and journey interact with the image world: we no longer take any notice of most images, concealed as they are by habit; in the same way, we ignore everything familiar in our environment and only notice what has changed. Change is informative, the familiar is redundant. The informative images reconstruct our experiences and memories—we are told to believe as if we are the witness.
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At a dinner table, an American friend of my age mentioned that she used 2008 Beijing Olympic as a marker of time in her life. “I was in college”, she said. I shared the same. I was twelve, when Beijing finally won the contract of the 2008 Olympic in 2001. Two months later, the twin tower collapsed in tears. I didn’t know what to react at the time, nonetheless, these two events become the prelude of my life till now. They have interweaved with my life via images, I remembered watching the happiness, joy, sadness, and tears on televisions and later internet. However, I was never there. I wasn’t in Moscow to witness the victory of Beijing, nor was in New York.
I arrived in New York on 2011. I was excited, yet the excitement quickly faded away. This was not the city I knew from the movie, television and internet. I tried to find images of places I remembered from the movie scenes, but failed. Until I pointed my brand new iPhone 4 to the Empire State Building, “wow”, this was it. I realized the New York I knew was something abstracted and reconstructed via camera lens. I knew the image of New York, but not the city itself.
Shortly after I arrived in New York, the Ground Zero opened to public for the first time. I was there. I saw a serviceman in his finest uniform, on one keen, touching the name etched on the outside of the pool. I took a picture of it. When I looked at the picture later, I realized the two timelines finally met. They are connected by the magic power of images, which somehow convinced myself I was there all the times, but I wasn’t sure: they were all abstracted and blurred.
My intention aims to define new experiences regarding perception and cognition. By synthesizing traditional image making process with new technology, I examine the boundary between the hyper-real and collective memory, between perceptual and embodied space. I composes arrangements within my online social survey and multi-cultural mindset to symbolize the subdivision of collective memory and our understanding of images in order to distill the larger themes of the broader human experience.
What I wrote above is a bold statement, but that is something I have been trying to do in the last a few months. Before I shift my interest to this, I was making art about my cultural heritage. I wrote about that experience in my last identity inquire, generally speaking, I was not satisfied with that, I also feel like playing the card of one’s nationality – Chinese – is obsolete. I was not satisfied with telling a story of some Chinese cultural aspect. I felt that was too empty and I could not negotiate the distance between me and that. I want to tell a story about myself, or at least about my generation. Dewey wrote about the importance of working with artist’s personal experience. I want to go deeper into my experience. I want to capture my experience between myself and the images around me. I thought about using family images but I felt that was too personal, I could not find myself to be connected with others. I want to work with something that can form connections with people. At that dinner table, the shared memory of images from Beijing Olympics connected me and my friend. We talked about the opening ceremony, the one thousand drum players, the light show painting, and the fireworks. We were not in Beijing at the time, but we all watched that over television and remembered that event by remembering those images. The image has become the bridge to connect our experience. Thus, I decided to find more bridges – images – which shared among my generation, not necessary of Chinese, but of a broader audience.
I feel the Beijing Olympics is something very crucial to the generation of my age in China. When Beijing won the contract, we were just about to become adolescent; when Beijing hosted the game in 2008, we were in college, another very transformative period of individual’s life. That solved half of the problem, but what about to reach a broader audience? It could be 9/11, as I live and practice here in the States. We probably remember the 9/11 in different ways, but that definitely left markers when we were growing up.
At a dinner table, an American friend of my age mentioned that she used 2008 Beijing Olympic as a marker of time in her life. “I was in college”, she said. I shared the same. I was twelve, when Beijing finally won the contract of the 2008 Olympic in 2001. Two months later, the twin tower collapsed in tears. I didn’t know what to react at the time, nonetheless, these two events become the prelude of my life till now. They have interweaved with my life via images, I remembered watching the happiness, joy, sadness, and tears on televisions and later internet. However, I was never there. I wasn’t in Moscow to witness the victory of Beijing, nor was in New York.
I arrived in New York on 2011. I was excited, yet the excitement quickly faded away. This was not the city I knew from the movie, television and internet. I tried to find images of places I remembered from the movie scenes, but failed. Until I pointed my brand new iPhone 4 to the Empire State Building, “wow”, this was it. I realized the New York I knew was something abstracted and reconstructed via camera lens. I knew the image of New York, but not the city itself.
Shortly after I arrived in New York, the Ground Zero opened to public for the first time. I was there. I saw a serviceman in his finest uniform, on one keen, touching the name etched on the outside of the pool. I took a picture of it. When I looked at the picture later, I realized the two timelines finally met. They are connected by the magic power of images, which somehow convinced myself I was there all the times, but I wasn’t sure: they were all abstracted and blurred.
My intention aims to define new experiences regarding perception and cognition. By synthesizing traditional image making process with new technology, I examine the boundary between the hyper-real and collective memory, between perceptual and embodied space. I composes arrangements within my online social survey and multi-cultural mindset to symbolize the subdivision of collective memory and our understanding of images in order to distill the larger themes of the broader human experience.
What I wrote above is a bold statement, but that is something I have been trying to do in the last a few months. Before I shift my interest to this, I was making art about my cultural heritage. I wrote about that experience in my last identity inquire, generally speaking, I was not satisfied with that, I also feel like playing the card of one’s nationality – Chinese – is obsolete. I was not satisfied with telling a story of some Chinese cultural aspect. I felt that was too empty and I could not negotiate the distance between me and that. I want to tell a story about myself, or at least about my generation. Dewey wrote about the importance of working with artist’s personal experience. I want to go deeper into my experience. I want to capture my experience between myself and the images around me. I thought about using family images but I felt that was too personal, I could not find myself to be connected with others. I want to work with something that can form connections with people. At that dinner table, the shared memory of images from Beijing Olympics connected me and my friend. We talked about the opening ceremony, the one thousand drum players, the light show painting, and the fireworks. We were not in Beijing at the time, but we all watched that over television and remembered that event by remembering those images. The image has become the bridge to connect our experience. Thus, I decided to find more bridges – images – which shared among my generation, not necessary of Chinese, but of a broader audience.
I feel the Beijing Olympics is something very crucial to the generation of my age in China. When Beijing won the contract, we were just about to become adolescent; when Beijing hosted the game in 2008, we were in college, another very transformative period of individual’s life. That solved half of the problem, but what about to reach a broader audience? It could be 9/11, as I live and practice here in the States. We probably remember the 9/11 in different ways, but that definitely left markers when we were growing up.