ARTIST STATEMENT
Who I am, what makes who I am for now and what I really want are my current life exploration projects. Since 2017 my parents got divorced and my study abroad experience started, I began to move from one home to another, and one nation to another. Thus, I am not emotionally connected with any place tightly. And I started to be obsessed with traveling. By traveling around, I am in search of a place where I feel I am belong to. To clarify my identity becomes one of my internal desire. Meanwhile, struggling with depression for seven years, emotionally I feel either like a ghost who is living out of the world and can not aware anything, or I feel extremely sad and confused with what ever happened or is happening on me. I try to commit suicide hundreds of times in my life. But then I will save myself once more than hundreds of times. Although in Chinese culture, people regards death as a taboo, death is already something I am familiar with. Thus, to continue with my posthumous photo project—Testament—I decide to break the conventional taboo and face death directly, which, also means to face my inner desire. By exploring the contents of the project, I try to analyze myself from a third rational perspective of what I am looking forward to get from the result of death. The exploration is also making an internal reconciliation of myself while I am using photography as a language to express my buried feelings and stories.
Testament is now a constructed storytelling world with different lines for me to express my hidden feelings and stories. By experimenting with different photographic methods such as B shot mode of DSLR camera, double exposure of polaroid camera, by trying out with different printed materials, size of works, and also by making photo books, I finally found a logical way to express myself which is a whole of mess by using language of photography.
Who I am, what makes who I am for now and what I really want are my current life exploration projects. Since 2017 my parents got divorced and my study abroad experience started, I began to move from one home to another, and one nation to another. Thus, I am not emotionally connected with any place tightly. And I started to be obsessed with traveling. By traveling around, I am in search of a place where I feel I am belong to. To clarify my identity becomes one of my internal desire. Meanwhile, struggling with depression for seven years, emotionally I feel either like a ghost who is living out of the world and can not aware anything, or I feel extremely sad and confused with what ever happened or is happening on me. I try to commit suicide hundreds of times in my life. But then I will save myself once more than hundreds of times. Although in Chinese culture, people regards death as a taboo, death is already something I am familiar with. Thus, to continue with my posthumous photo project—Testament—I decide to break the conventional taboo and face death directly, which, also means to face my inner desire. By exploring the contents of the project, I try to analyze myself from a third rational perspective of what I am looking forward to get from the result of death. The exploration is also making an internal reconciliation of myself while I am using photography as a language to express my buried feelings and stories.
Testament is now a constructed storytelling world with different lines for me to express my hidden feelings and stories. By experimenting with different photographic methods such as B shot mode of DSLR camera, double exposure of polaroid camera, by trying out with different printed materials, size of works, and also by making photo books, I finally found a logical way to express myself which is a whole of mess by using language of photography.
