The Wind of Yesterday
2024
Installation
This work originates from the artist's contemplation of the tension between intimate family memories and epochal transformations. At its heart lies an old electric fan that witnessed the artist’s parents' marriage, whose breeze continuously stirs a lightweight plastic bag. Printed on the bag is the window from the artist’s childhood home, which has since been demolished—a fragment of a once-familiar world extracted from an old photograph.
This still-operational old fan breathes life into this fragile "home" through its dynamic movement. Yet, the plastic bag bearing the window image remains perpetually light and unsettled. The plastic bag, an everyday, disposable, and fragile material, here becomes a temporary "container" for the imagery of a lost home. The window image on it, a remnant of what was once a stable physical space and spiritual sanctuary, appears unstable and distorted due to the bag's lightness and the wind’s agitation. This instability vividly mirrors the non-fixed nature of memory itself—it is not an unchanging archive but a dynamic process, continuously diluted, distorted, or intensified within the tension between recollection and forgetting.
Through this work, the artist seeks to capture the loss and pursuit of individual experience amid rapid urbanization. Under the grand narrative of "development," countless physical spaces that once held individual and community histories are swiftly erased. When physical spaces cease to exist, where does memory find its anchor? As the past is constantly rewritten, how do we capture memories of it—fleeting and elusive as the wind.