Jen Kun YEH
While Wind Blowing
Ink eastern gouache silver foil canvas silk fabric
125*70cm
2023
In 2008, I began to create a series of landscape images that evoke memories of a city. Oftentimes, one’s recollection is not as accurate or precise as that of a picture; it is a general impression and feeling. Therefore, in my works I mostly create landscapes by simulating what lives in my memories through reconstructing and assembling. As for how I select city images, I tend to start from corners that are easily forgotten. Life experiences increase and constantly shift between city and country and visual experiences also gradually expand. This allows for my options to no longer be confined by the lost spaces of city centers. Still, I never stray away from the gargantuan man-made cement buildings and the spaces that they create.
The pursuit of intrinsic emotions and its fragments are added to the images. In the depth of my remembrance, trailing the scent of time and following traces of memory, I painstakingly excavate pieces of memories that connect self and space. Similarly, time causes buildings to peel and pare, leaving behind vestiges of life and an ineffaceable vector that carries memories. I visualize a scene that belongs to my memories and, through my work, try to demonstrate the images in my mind that never cease to rearrange and form.
When I place this simulated landscape of memories under the pretense of a gloomily blue time-space, the serenity and remoteness it conveys seems to lure the audience to fall back into the depth of memories. I attempt to make my audience feel the emotions I experienced when creating work. The temperature emanated by time slowly neutralizes the coldness emitted by great masses of buildings. The silent time-space and dim glimmer pits the anxiety and restlessness that arose in one’s heart against each other. In so doing, some obscure emotional experience is conveyed and the audience is challenged to recall similar or dissimilar memories.
The memories of cities that I am concerned with differ from the impressions held by the masses. Smooth surfaces cannot grab onto the traces of time. I withdraw from neat and beautiful appearances in order to explore the corners of the city. This is just like listening to the innermost voices of one’s heart and is the memory that I believe to be most authentic, direct, and moving.