Family Album
Family Album is a work I come across online, which is host by Nottingham Contemporary as an attempt to provide insight into the multiplicity of female identities in Chinese culture in the form of NOW: A Dialogue on Female Chinese Contemporary Artists. I was intrigued by the Chinese artist Ye Funa's work Family Album in which she took on the guises of each of her relatives to show intimacy and incorporated their voices from the interview. She reenacted the character of her mother and grandparents with humor, appropriation, and role-playing. As to me, it's a creative strategy to show a narrative within the traditional private sphere.
It is a truism that the experience of the 90s of China drove me to ponder the counterpart of identification with gender and domestic space as well prompted an investigative studio process in which I used to inhabit in such an area. We both manipulate old family photos to show subjective memory. As we know, back then f we wouldn't take a photograph in a wasteful way. These family photos have this expensive and precious feature that contains lots of conventions, and it's the key moment of these people's life trajectory. However, photographs, as is known they are not mean to be representational, while that never has restrained painting. Between Ye and me, we were trying to show a different intention within our work while I was messing with my memory. Human memory is notoriously unreliable, and photos from the past are almost an unreliable witness in that respect. Scientists have found that prompting an eyewitness to remember more can generate outright false details, but that feels just as correct to the witness as actual memories. In day-to-day life, this isn't a bug; it's a feature. My paintings here also become an unreliable witness in that respect.