Transplant

The Transplant series is a dive into old memories of an estranged part of my past. It is a continuation from the groundwork laid down by the Self-Portrait and Revisit | Reconciliation projects. I produced the majority of pieces as the 2017 Artist-in-Nonresidence for the Nat. Brut magazine, and the œuvre is subsequently published in the Spring 2018 issue, accompanied by an essay by the multi-talented Lora Stoianova. The primary technique employed is laminated paper collage sometimes stained with gold oil enamel.

During one of the family moves, I came across a couple of VCR tapes dated from 1994 that my father had initially brought along with him when we first immigrated to America. When I finally found a machine that could read non-American encoding standards and popped the tapes in, I could not believe what I was seeing on the screen. There, huddled by a bush on the mountains where our ancestors were buried and our family would hike annually to clear weeds and pay respect, was my four-year-old self. Although I had no recollection of this particular trip, the hills and the ferns that covered them looked vaguely familiar. My younger self, however, did not. I could recognize that it was me, but it did not feel like I was watching my own history. Rather, it was as if I was watching someone else live out my past. My reminiscence felt similar to the Paul Bereyter story in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, in that while they are both deeply personal tales about the distant life of someone else, they are both told by a narrator even more distant.

Remembrance is one way to keep something or someone alive, but memories are prone to distortions - on top of the compression that the act of recording inevitably introduces. For a photograph, the scene is a projection onto a flat surface; for a video, the scene is a projection onto flat, sequential surfaces. This loss in definition is what emerging technology is trying to mitigate: by capturing another dimension typically lost in translation (for example, agency in perspective in the case of navigating in a 360-video, or enhanced sense of presence in the case of VR immersion), they promise an experience more convincingly real. But how much could higher fidelity to reality do to change the way we compress our own memories? The process of going through and digitizing the tapes has definitely further compressed my memories of our family ritual. Now, whenever I try to remember one of those trips on that hillside under the soft spring mist, all I could summon are reconstructions of scenes based on images from the tape that have seared into my brain as “true” memory.

In a way, my work with these images is an attempt to reintroduce the space for ambiguity into my past. By re-covering up faces and places, I can soften the impact that burned images could have on something as fragile as mutable memories. It was customary in 90s China to seal printed photographs in small, rounded-cornered lamination sleeves to protect them from aging. I am borrowing this same technique of lamination for these constructed photos to compress and flatten all of the layers of a constructed memory - just as a photo would and should do. That way, what’s recorded is not purported objectivity but rather ambiguity.

Sealing them off as artifacts of the past to be preserved also plays into the tension between the archival and participatory natures of photography that Sontag has discussed at great length. For all I know, if someone I trusted were to come along, give me a VCR tape, and tell me that the little four-year-old boy in the footage was me, given how I have no recollection of history that far back, I would have to believe them as there would have been no way to disprove it. Lamination solidifies the role these objects play in recording history, and my decision to laminate my constructions is gesturing at my role in willingly rewriting my own history and then believing it. Found footage is an indemonstrable record of what had happened, but constructed footage is an irrefutable record of what my mind has done to how I remember what had happened.

There’s also something that I find powerful about the format of physical photographic constructs. It was common practice to write short captions on the flip-side of printed photos before they were laminated. In effect, you had two moments in time - one projected into the photo, and the other in reminiscence through scribbles - compressed into one object. Although they both generally reference to the same point in time, they are still two separate gestures inhabiting two opposite sides of the photo paper. You can look at one side and then carry that memory of looking at it to the other side, but you can never look at both sides at the same time. On a web album, photo captions are often shown immediately next to the image, leaving very little physical and temporal space in between. The case for prints, on the other hand, works a lot more like Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) film, where you’re denied the pleasure of simultaneity and instead have to resort to what you remember having seen/heard. Only with the passage of time, when the acidity of the ink allows it to bleed through the paper, can disparate moments merge into one.

While it is inherent for physical photos to have two sides, the dialogue between the two sides does not need to be one of illustration and explication. Levels of translucency or transparency through the paper/lamination is one way of opening up that dialogue. In two of my explorations seen below, I construct parallel images - one on the surface of the work, and the other either behind or encased within the layers of paper. When the photo is held in front of a light source, light from the other side penetrates the parts of paper that are translucent, collapsing the two disparate spaces into one and revealing a wholly different space. This collapse is pushed further in GIF, where the two realities fade into each other endlessly. Technically, I still cannot achieve simultaneity because two images cannot occupy the same space at the same time on screen, but in effect, the retinal afterimages would bleed into each other, and two spaces would collide.

Ironically, on a macroscopic level for this continuing project of mine, collision of spaces is the theme of it all. Through constructing and modifying memories, I am bringing the past into the present and allowing my present to change how I remember my past. In a way, I am inserting my current self into spaces in memory - an act of self-transplant.