“Mother” consists of 14 photographs and a video dedicating to my absent mother. Absence is a form of presence. Since my mother passed away, I went back to China where I was born and found 14 mothers who are my mother’s close friends and relatives. I bought a pair of floral embroidered traditional Chinese shoes to each mother as a gift, because my mother always loved the floral embroidered shoes. We took photographs together at each mother’s home where the mother wore the new shoes and I wore her cloth. After taking photos with each mother, I invited all mothers to come together for a group portrait that was transformed to a video later. For video, please see a link below

This work seeks consolation and restores narrations of the past through visual expression of memories and loss, exploring relationship between life and death, human existence and universal emotions. I use re-enactment as a method of revisiting and re-imagining past to create scenarios of my mother visiting her birth place and meeting her childhood friends. Through using my own body to present my mother’s present, I reunite with my mother and become her. This work reveals how the mother/daughter relationship is experienced as a site of love and care, and how memories cross time and space to create a new experience that not only transcends life and death, bridges past and present, but also transforms emotions and realities. “Mother” is an embodiment of a melancholic longing for an unrecoverable past and a memento mori: a reminder of the inexorable passage of time and the beautiful transience of human life.

For video, please visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwMxF1pPtlU

Mother was exhibited at DongGang Museum of Photograph in South Korea in 2018, presented by DongGang International Photo Festival, For installation view, please visit
https://chunhuacatherinedong.com/portfolio/solo-exhibition-mother/

Chun Hua Catherine Dong thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its financial support