When Everything Is Still A Lake（2019）
The past events told by my family members made a great curiosity for me. My absence in these events and their profound impact on me formed a sharp contradiction. I was curious about the world they lived in. And my original intention of creation was generated accordingly. As interviews with family members constantly deepen, I found that some subtle changes in their lives often represent changes in society and changes in times. Therefore, I made up the novel text on the basis of my family members’ oral narration. Then, taking the text as a clue, I came to the real scene of the story, and the place where the story took place as a viewer. In this way, the intersection of personal history and changes of The Times, imagination and fiction was explored with the method of image creation.
When the ancestors walked out of the countryside and came to the oil filed, when the family obtained their first color television, these great changes were compressed and decomposed, entering the daily lives of every family. In my fictitious text, I made up a fictitious protagonist named "Xu Zhaoyuan". Following this era, he walked out of the mountains. With various policies and developments of the country, he made a journey along Qiqihar-Hulan- -Daqing-Langfang. Behind the journey are the changes in the Chinese countryside, the changes in the education system, the commune system and border battles, the development and decline of resource cities and other social phenomena. These seemingly complex and harsh issues present a contradiction in these peaceful images. It is a contradiction natural in every citizen--the balance between a huge age and a small life.
When I came to Daqing Museum, and confronted the relic map of the ancient lake in northern China, I suddenly realized that my ancestors were like fish, swimming in this huge ancient lake. They thought they had already walked onto the land, yet they never seemed to swim to the shore...