Memory Lane

记忆之轨

The New Gallery
Aug 30 - Oct 19, 2024

Artists:
Yuxiang Dong
Lan “Florence” Yee
Beichen Zhang
Shellie Zhang
Andong Zheng

Co-curated with Brubey Hu.

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

—Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

In both its glaring proximity and opaqueness, memory is in itself a contradiction, like an image and picture, enacting both as a storage and a barricade of the past. In the exhibition, the works of Yuxiang Dong, Lan “Florence” Yee, Beichen Zhang, Shellie Zhang, and Andong Zheng pay homage to memory in all its disjunctures, with its irreproducibility from a personal level to the stipulated qualities from a collective perspective, memory is at once a site of relief as well as struggle.

Both Lan “Florence” Yee and Beichen Zhang deploy gestures of reconciliation with loss. While Lan’s sensual gesture introspects an accelerated loss of information through the gradual reproduction of mundane and familial memories, Beichen’s nostalgia is attached to looted objects whose past was rendered increasingly inaccessible through colonial extraction. Moreover, by scaling “the guest greeting pines” as a manipulated apparatus of the empire, Andong brings forth issues of mass censorship and epistemological control in close proximity to the cultural imaginary of Pinus hwangshanensis (Huangshan Pine), reorienting the quotidian act of seeing as a political destination that deconstructs engrained imperial sentiment sitting behind practices of botanical taxonomy. Lastly, the works of Yuxiang Dong and Shellie Zhang unearth the racial economy of archives, in which the historical fabrication of a racialized imaginary of Chinese immigrants continues to haunt the contemporary portrayals of that past.

The annal of history isn’t as linear as it seems, but full of twists and turns. Our nostalgia allures poignant attempts to resituate the affinities with our past, walking the ambiguous lane of the personal and the collective that weaves into each other’s constellations. In the process of retrieval, we cross paths with sites unseen and lanes unventured, distorting our visions, rendering its parts inaccessible, chiselling parts more lucid.

“所有的记忆都是个人的、无法被复刻——随着每个人所逝去。所谓的集体记忆，不是缅怀，而是一种约定俗成：一个关于故事的如何发生，以及图像如何将故事锁定在我们脑中。”

—苏珊·桑塔格《旁观他人之痛苦》

记忆是个矛盾体，近在咫尺却又模糊不清，图像既是对于过往的存储也是屏障。在此展览中，艺术家董宇翔、余承佳、张北辰、张雪莱、以及郑安东的作品致敬了记忆的非连贯性，从个人层面的不可复刻拉拽至集体记忆的约定俗成，将记忆转换为一个冲突性的场域。

余承佳和张北辰的作品都尝试与记忆的流失做和解。余承佳将ta的感性触角掷于在过度复刻中逐渐流失的日常及亲缘记忆；张北辰则在检索依附于掠夺之物的个人记忆中、将殖民主义的根植的榨取逻辑逐渐放大。郑安东的“迎客松”，是帝国操纵叙事的工具，结合对于黄山松的文化想象，将日常的观看重新定位成一种具有政治目的的行为，解构植物分类学背后根深蒂固的帝国情怀。董宇翔和张雪莱的作品挖掘了档案中的种族经济延伸出的华裔形象，与其在现实与历史编纂过程中的单一化与重复性。

记忆的年轮迂回曲折，行走在个人与集体相互交织的冲突场域上，怀旧情结诱使人们试图重新定位和过去的亲缘关系。在追寻的过程中，人们与素未谋面的场所和小路擦肩而过，这扭曲了人们的视野，部分的过往变得难以接近，部分则被雕琢的更加清晰。