Evaporated Love (2024)

This project navigates the contradictions of familial love shaped by the absence of a father figure. It confronts a repressed personal history and reflects the emotional complexities tied to a disrupted family structure. Through an installation comprising sculpture and drawings, the project reveals the paradox of emotions and struggles to reconcile childhood disruption with the fragmented past. 

 

Throughout the process of sculpting and threading, it recalls and reimagines fragmented, buried, and altered memories of my father, who has remained emotionally and physically distant since I was ten, and rethinks his relationships with my mother, elder brother and me. The process unpacks the fallibility of memory and paradox of emotions, while the contradictory materials serve to highlight the fragile yet enduring nature of familial relationships and the painful process of confronting a restrained and unresolved love.

 

Extending beyond my personal experience, this project also touches on broader themes such as kinships, marriage, parenting and the constrained expression of love within Chinese cultures through drawings, text and found objects. It reflects on the questions and emotions an adaptive child has neglected or suppressed, questioning how parental influence, silence, and the passage of time shape our perceptions of love, guilt, and belonging.

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In this exploration, the work holds emotional and cognitive conflict, embodying the intimacy and vulnerability in confronting memory lost and the struggle to acknowledge a love that was, is and will never fully be understood.