On Memory

I have been capturing such moments: where text and images refract and reflect among materiality, collaboratively assembling something akin to what can be called memory. Then are the names we all know: “history”, “culture”, “heritage”. The world is a multitude of orderless chaos forming a meaningful whole, and each individual and collective crystallizes their own order within it. We have always been processing memories— with some add-ons and judgements—called “experience”, “truth”, “evidence”. How memory works and function doesn’t really matter to me — though I am interested in — that’s the job of neuroscientists. What I care is how we remember things, or to say, re-memory.

I am obsessed with such moments: when a memory hits you all of a sudden, triggered by unforeseen little things. These moments of involuntary memory, which bring the past rushing back in vivid detail—much like the scent of the madeleine in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—might be likened to cracks in my mind. Through these cracks, I catch glimpses of the memories accumulated throughout my life, though I may never have the chance to visit them again.

Forgetting, the drive of creating memory.

Oh, how does the theme of Memory resonate with my practice? No artist’s work can get away from memory, even though it’s not themed as “memory”, they’re still haunting. I refused to play the game of definition.

I’ve been thinking how memory is fashioned by creation, and remembering and time are the hands to the clay.

From the beginning of this year, I have this idea of a video work incubating: something about memory, a video essay, or preferably a vlog using only the images, visual materials in my iPhone photo album. Those footages are not created for a strong purpose, not with an intention of “I am going to make a vlog”. Sometimes you even seldom revisit them because they were living in a mundane reality where the jinx of remembering cannot survive time. But you still made them, these pure images. For what? It was during pandemic, I was in school in the Netherlands and couldn’t go back to Taiwan for 2 years. Nights were for homesick, I survived on 100 GB of memory, scrolling through my album from bottom to the head, again and again.

I always stopped at the videos of my nephew. In those videos, he was still one year old. He in real life is no longer him in the videos: he grows so fast like the pumpkin for Halloween, and got a little sister, and probably didn’t even remember who his auntie was. I create an identity for him. He should not be just a sign of nephew, he should be a ever-growing persona even in my memory regardless distance and time. There’s two realities living in the concept of my nephew. To remember is to create. Remembering is the extension of perception beyond time and space, the yearn to recapture.

To create is to remember. But the storyline is so vague, as the spaces in-between memories are wide and I couldn’t make up my mind that with which attitude to deal with them. Alongside the contemplation aka. hesitation on aesthetic, It’s still stranded. However, the restless worker side of the artist mind doesn’t allow me to lie fallow. I anyway started a little practice. I printed out some photos randomly with intention I can’t pinpoint, each 5cm in width, and sticked them on a A5 notebook, two photos per page. When I’ve got nothing to do, I will take out this notebook, and stare at one of the photos, remembering, and write down everything I can. This revision is rediscovering, seeing what time has brewed for life. Am I looking for or verifying what Barthes said “Punctum”? I still don’t know.

Not long after that, I came across Walter Benjamin’s essay on Excavation and Memory.

“Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.” I realize that, yes, me —she who seeks to approach her and her ancestors buried past,— has always been working as a woman digging in my practice.

What matters for an artist is never the memory itself, but how one investigate, deal with, connect between the experiences. Personal and collective memory and history are important, but it’s too easy to be important in a traditional art-history analysis. If what artists do is a reflection of personal history, then art becomes a competition of resources of personal fate.

Maybe what I do is always seeking, not the answer, not an arrival, but that “all of a sudden”, that encountering. What did bury the memory? What’s the social architecture it appears to me? How do I read them? How do I re-memorize them?