She’ll Always Be Your Little Girl 97/8/20

She’ll Always Be Your Little Girl 97/8/20, 2020.
Oil and mix mediums on canvas
Size:105x120cm
This work I did during the third lockdown in London as a reconciled memory. The world at large has been brutalized by the world-wide war against COVID 19, giving accounts for the number of human fatalities and enormous economic losses. The new enemy to humankind is a mysterious virus; an invisible killer that separates us from each other. Home is one flight away while I am trapped in London. This experience has invoked the quality of nostalgia in memory that drives my consciousness back to the place called home and has made me realize the pandemic creates a new virtual diaspora as I am separating the family body through time and space. Society as a collective nation shares a parallel experience of separateness both from themselves their body their community and their family. So, we become kind sympathies virtual beings. The pandemic has compounded a sense of estrangement, it has also given an opportunity for a compassionate re-evaluation of the family's narrative and dynamics, a re-thinking of who I am and what I represent as a collective entity.
Found this family portrait shooted on August 20, 1997, I was only age 3, indeed, we look like a group of people that in the moment of sharing pride itself as a family. All this set up a tension between the ‘personal’ memory and the social moment of making memories or memorizing. Meanings and memories change with time, but mutually contradictory, may even be an occasion for, or an expression of, conflict. “She’ll Always Be Your Little Girl 97/8/20” as psychological compensation for being homeward when my father recovered from life-threatening lung cancer in China while I was trapped in London. I was longing for affectionate parenthood; the idea that I am taking pride of us as a family; the imagined reality that I am there to support my father and me will always be there. I found it powerful that the stories and the memories forever gravitated me as they were never sustained, but constantly being reconstructed in the present. The ever-negotiable role of domestic memory complicates the perpetual photographic moment: the artist's current condition and its reflection contest between the ideology of family and the reality of family.