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My work is derived from my thinking about the inescapable influence of the cultural and political conditions that shaped my personal history.
Born in China in 1980s, I grew up alongside the country’s modernization, westernization and economic boom. Since I started my education in the United States, homeland has become a distant memory in faded family albums. Have the old times truly survived in those photographs? What would happen if I could return and revisit them?
In my images, I combine my current self-portraits with vintage family photographs as a way to reveal the temporal, geographic, cultural and political transformations of my life from China to the United States. When time has evaporated and turned into a photograph that records a ray of sadness in the everlasting twilight, we can never go back. However, digital technology gives me the rare opportunity to travel back and forth between past and present to formulate a deeper understanding. Through my photography, I see the evidence of vicissitudes, and I seek to discover, capture, remember and reconstruct the eternal meaning that will remain after all the vanity under the sun disappears.
