I am very pleased announce that I will have a solo exhibition at DongGang Museum of Photography, Gangwon-do, Korea, as part of DongGang International Photo Festival.  It is my great honour to be selected as “ The Artist of The Year,” by DongGang International Photo Festival. And my work “ Mother” will be exhibited in the museum, June 14-Sept 21, 2018.

For more info about “Mother”
for more info about DongGang International Photo Festival
for more info about DongGang Museum of Photography

 

“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 wears the new shoes and I wear her cloth. After taking photos with each mother, I invited all mothers to come together for a group portrait.

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 empowerment, 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.