Memory Path, 2024
Video Installation

The work takes as its source material a group photograph from the artist’s junior high school yearbook. After viewers gaze at the scene for a period of time, the figures gradually begin to emerge, only to fade away again moments later. With a subtly uncanny poetics, the work evokes an atmosphere of nostalgia and unease surrounding remembrance and documentation in a technological society.
 

Portrait photographs are originally intended to serve as key markers for identifying individual features. Yet here, the most crucial facial details are obscured by QR Codes. After scanning the QR Code, viewers are directed to search results generated by entering the name of the person depicted into Google. In this process, the face is translated into data that can be searched and indexed; the specificity of the individual disperses within the torrent of information, while memory becomes something traceable, yet impossible to truly retrieve.