Presented by Galerie Urs Meile

Pictures in this video were selected from an amount of nearly 600,000 images which depict the lives of ordinary Chinese people. The time of these selected photos spans nearly a century. The oldest can be traced back to the early Republican period, and the most recent to the late 1990s. It is a slow, organic process in which the artist has spent six years in choosing the images, arranging, and editing. When compiling, the artist discovered that these pictures could not be separated from the path of history. In the twentieth century, Chinese society experienced a massive historical change, and this change is still ongoing. The appearance and circumstances of people from different eras were influenced by the ideology of their times. For example, there is a visible difference in people’s appearance, clothing, and manner of people between the Republican era and the post-1949 period. After Reform and Opening, new changes appeared in people. There are significant differences between people’s circumstances in each of these periods, and these changes were not part of slow, gradual evolution. They were sudden transformations, extremely short at a particular time point.

These pictures carry the memories of Chinese people, and the recall is the only way to construct a life. This construction process includes the artist’s vision of history, and this vision is the only way to understand the facts. The construction of memory and history is neither complete nor fair, which is just a kind of imagination or allegory.