Fragment of Our Imagination

Our imagination is filled with people we have never met, places we have never been, and dreams that we have never realized. We have not seen the past through the eyes of those who lived it, yet we can imagine their civilizations and ways of life. We have never met our great grandparents and their parents, who passed away well before we were born, yet we can use a photograph of them to portray their prowess.

On the macro level, how do we visualize times, places, and cultures we have only heard described to us by experts and witnesses, and yet have personally never stepped foot into? On the micro level, how do we understand people close to us who we have never met, people we are supposed to be connected to, imagined through artifacts from another time? In truth, we simply fill in the stories about these places and people to suit us. Standing among the ruins of human civilization and incomplete family history, we take a fragment and reimagine a whole painting about people from tens, hundreds, and thousands of years ago.

Inspired by our own grandparents who died before we were children, we want to show how we can narrate their lives filtered through our own imaginations, through the words of others, and through the photos selected by the passage of time. We present a vision of persons close to our hearts, told through voices from our family, from the past, from images, and from GenAI, narrating these personality fragments through human, machine, and community interpretation.

FRAGMENT OF OUR IMAGINATION uses the multimedia disciplines of video art, photography, and installation to show how we turn scant sources of information from distant and long-ago artifacts into filled-in imagined narratives about the people we have never met, the places we have never been, in the cultures we have never encountered.

Exhibition at Shanghai's Acentric Space.