From the White Terror to the Flickr Era
My intention is not to recount a specific historical event, but rather to borrow a structure of familiar collective melancholy, one that has often been used to carry historical memory and relocate it into a memory system of my generation: one that is non-dramatic, non-monumental, and spoken in a whisper. I’ve come to realise that a similar experience of repression, blurring, and self-erasure exists in the shared perception of Chinese and Asian youth of my generation.
We grew up in a time saturated with digital images, where emotional expression is over-coded, and intimate relationships slowly dissolve. Platforms like QQ Space (an early Chinese social media), early digital cameras, and instant film were not nostalgic relics, but real containers of our emotional development. In Part 2, I try to approach a kind of non-figurative emotional history, one without a clear timeline, without enemies, without defined trauma, through visual fragmentation, drifting sounds, and disrupted viewer relations. This history is not monumental, but it quietly seeps into the fragments of our everyday life.
Though this work adopts the formal framework of “political memory,” its true concern lies in how people today struggle almost unsuccessfully to sustain intimacy, to gaze at one another, and to remain connected.