The River of Time
By Xingrui Ma

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2019

© Xingrui Ma, 2019

Abstract
Through a visual art practice and research, this thesis explores my personal background
as a Chinese immigrant, through depicting scattered childhood memory to seek overlooked
connections among people, objects, and places. By investigation of theories of human
geography, social psychology, philosophy, especially Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place and
Maurice Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory, I considered how people's sense of belonging
to homeland is strengthened through memories of ordinary objects and everyday interactions.
In relationship to my practice, I define memory as a semi-fabricated hallucination. I further
invoke time in my projects in reference to Svetlana Boym’s concept of contemporary
nostalgia.
The paper analyzes my projects, The Tuesday Afternoon, Snow, and River, which I
produced during my study in the MFA program of Emily Carr University. I employ
watercolor painting and animation installation as my medium, inspired by artists Luc
Tuymans, Christian Boltanski and William Kentridge, to explore the following questions:
how do fragmented still images and dynamic animations in dark spaces transmit the feelings
of loss and disorder caused during immigration, and the ambivalence of memory? Could
these practices create a space of intersection for personal and collective memory? How does
the use of obsolete technology contrast with the contemporary concept of time in rapidly
developing society?

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

2

LIST OF IMAGES

3

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

4

DEDICATION

5

INTRODUCTION

6

SUBJECT POSITION

8

1

Memory Image

10

2

Home Place

16

3

The Nostalgia of Time

19

CONCLUSION

26

WORKS CITED

28

2

LIST OF IMAGES:
Figure 1 The Tuesday Afternoon, watercolor on paper, 24 x 36 in 2018

11

Figure 2 The Tuesday Afternoon, details, 2018

13

Figure 3 The Tuesday Afternoon, details 2, 2018

13

Figure 4 The Arrival by Shaun Tan, graphic novel, 2006

14

Figure 5 The Rumour by Luc Tuyman, Suite of 7 lithographs encased in painted wood & plexi,
with wooden birdcage in four panels, 91.56x516x6.5cm 2002-2003

15

Figure 6 Snow, animation, 2018

20

Figure 7 Snow, view 2, animation, 2018

21

Figure 8 River, installation view, 2018

23

Figure 9 River detail(Animation), 2018

25

Figure 10 River detail (Slides), 2018

25

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank and acknowledge my supervisor Amory Abbott for his advice, support,
time and commitment throughout this project.
I would like to acknowledge that I am living and finished this thesis support paper as an
uninvited guest on the ancestral and unceded territories of the indigenous Musqueam,
Squamish, and Tsleil-Wahtuth Nations.
I also wish to acknowledge my parents and friends for their love that supported me though
this process.

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DEDICATION
This paper is dedicated to my grandmother.

5

Introduction
As an artist, I like to depict ordinary objects and humble experiences from my
memories with watercolor paintings, animation and installation. I am interested in
these daily memories because they hold values that can link people with a place. As a
Chinese immigrant who arrived in Canada at the age of twelve, I went through a
difficult process of adapting to a new life and reconstructing identity. During that
process, memories of my old home haunted me in the form of scattered images. From
these memory images I can learn how I gradually build connections with people,
objects and places through everyday interactions. At the same time, these memories
reveal a sense of ambivalence because they are mixed of real and constructed
information. I am curious about how this form of reminiscence might be linked with
the dislocated1 experience of immigration.
Due to the increasingly globalized world and rapidly developing transportation in
recent decades, traveling though geopolitical regions becomes a prevalent
phenomenon. The International Organization for Migration estimates “that there are
244 million international migrants globally (or 3.3% of the world’s population),’’ and
about a quarter of the population are from China. (World Migration Report 2018)
These immigrants usually face a complex psychological process that affects an
individual’s identity, resulting from culture shock and mourning over the losses
inherent in migration. This mourning process often accompanied by nostalgia -the
yearning for old homeland. I notice that I share the difficult process with a large group
of people. In order to further address this universal experience, I look into theories of
human geography, social psychology, philosophy, and also works from artists who
interested in similar topics of diaspora, memory, narrative and time to find
inspirations for my artistic practice. My research began with my personal immigration
background, through depicting scattered childhood memory to seek overlooked
1

I use this term to generalize the uncomfortable feeling of people who are away from their
native land, and not able to fully integrate into the new culture and linguistic environment.
6

connections among people, objects and places. During my study in the MFA program
at Emily Carr University, I choose watercolor painting and animation installation as
my medium to explore how fragmented still images and dynamic animations in dark
spaces transmit the feeling of loss and disorder during immigration, and the
ambivalence of memory? Could these practices create a space of intersection of
personal and collective memory?
I am employing autobiography2 as a support to research on self and identity. To
ask questions and seek answers to phenomena I experience in life is a mode of
thinking for me. This attitude keeps me reflectively attentive to the ways I live
through experiences, thus I can better understand myself, and find solutions to life. I
begin my practice with a recollection of self history in order to interpret the past from
the standpoint of the present, and then build my understanding on immigration,
memory, narrative and time through theoretical research. Also, I investigate artists’
works that navigate similar interests I mentioned above to understand the situation of
my work in the contemporary art making context, and to expand on the potential of
my research area.
Through the artmaking process, I adopt the form of autobiography as a catalyst in
the recollection of personal experience that speaks to the power of memory in
generating affect. I also transform theoretical reference into visual language create a
space for viewers to experience. The major medium I use shifted from watercolor
painting to animation installation in the Fall semester of 2018. This decision was
made due to the intention to enclose viewers in a dark space with larger-than-life
dynamic images to trigger an immersive experience. Each project followed with a test
on small group of people to experiment if the topic and question is transported to
viewers, in order to optimize my creative practice.
Autobiography is a method used to understand one's self. "A significant feature of human lives
is that they require recollection,... resituating, reinterpreting, and rewriting the past as a function of
one’s ever-changing present. Life events, therefore, may be considered “episodes” in an evolving
narrative of the self, and just as the past is perpetually rewritten from the standpoint of the present,
so too is the self”(Given 47) Therefore, the relationship between self and autobiographical
narrative is being a dialectical one, as the self is the source of autobiography, autobiography is the
source of the self (Given 47).
2

7

Subject Position
I had two major moves in my childhood. Each time it caused me a pain due to
separation from home and the change in living habits. At the age of ten, I moved from
Jiangsu to the more developed province of Zhejiang with my parents. I have been
rootless3 since then. It was my first time experiencing the uncomfortable mood
swings caused by loneliness and dislocation. When I was twelve years old, I
immigrated to Canada. The resettling process came with a strong sense of loss: loss of
friends, loss of familiar linguistic environment and loss of a sense of belonging. I
suffered from the pressure and anxiety of acquiring a new language, assuming new
roles, and experiencing new ways to relate to others.
This change in my life, however, stimulated my art practice. I see visual art,
especially when depicting personal memories, as a way to retrospect and consolidate
my identity; at the same time it operates as an external communicative tool, by
passing the need for specific linguistic knowledge. I became an observer and collector
of memories and the ordinary in everyday life. In my way of seeking values in the
memorable experiences, I notice that the meaning of a geographical place does shift
by people’s affect. In other words, intimate experience can attach people to a place
from which can evolve one’s sense of belonging to homeland.
Even after 10 years living in Canada, the same length I lived in my hometown,
the strong sense of rootlessness continues to haunts me. The growing uncertainty of
where I belong is destabilized further by the fact that I am disjointed from both
Chinese and Western culture. This promoted me to pursue a explicit identity. There is
an ambivalence between longing for a Chinese community while simultaneously
being habituated to a Canadian living environment. I am now far away from my

3

The word rootlessness I used here is to describe myself have no sense of belonging to a
particular place. I no longer have a home to return in my birth place Jiangsu since my whole
family moved to Zhejiang. However, I only lived two years in Zhejiang before I came to Canada, I
do not see it as my hometown.
8

hometown, geographically and in terms of time. How do I feed the young self, who
stops growing, and exists in the internal of me with the hunger for belonging?
Even by knowing that home is a fantasy that does not exist, the imperfection of
the land is concealed by the sentiment of longing, and I still intensively bond to it. I
share an idea with media artist and professor of comparative literature Svetlana Boym
that the past reveals the potentialities where the future is born in. Boym states in his
book The Future of Nostalgia, “[O]ne is nostalgic not for the past the way it was, but
for the past the way it could have been. It is this past perfect that one strives to realize
in the future.” (351) In my art practice, I create space for the fantasy of home to lie, to
expand, to activate reflection.
I am also inspired by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative
identity, “that is, a sort of identity to which a human being has access thanks to the
mediation of the narrative function.” (Ricoeur, 73) In Ricoeur’s idea, the knowledge
of the self is an interpretation, “that the self, narratively interpreted, is itself a figured
self - a self which figures itself as this or that. ”(80) In a sense, the remembered
personal history is sometimes fabricated or mixes with fact and fiction. It embodies
his/her imagination to the past to fill in gaps of memories and create a coherent life
story from the standpoint of the present. This concept helps me to form a fundamental
concept of my practice. It is through the narrative mediation in my work integrating
discordant fragments into a concordance story that I interpret my experience being a
Chinese immigrant. Also, from the work I produce my viewers can appropriate the
narrative to project their own life story, which is related to their identity.
There is a memory deeply imprinted in my mind. The first few years when I
started my life in Canada, I often turned off the lights and used the computer in the
dark room to chat with my family and friends back home.The act of turning off the
light is a manifestation of longing to isolate myself from the outside world. Hiding in
the dark enables me to concentrate without being disturbed by the surrounding
environment. Even though I was talking about living in the present moment with
family and friends, images of childhood memories come to haunt me. I cannot
remember a complete scenario. They are broken, magnified in details. I see in my
9

memories: my grandmother, childhood playmates, my father, my mother, my
mother’s colleagues in the hospital, the shop keeper, the milkman, and sometimes the
figure of myself. I am not able to recall the person’s face clearly, only a part of their
body. With this memory, I have the following questions for myself to consider during
the creating process: What can a dark space bring to people? Can the darkness be a
tool to create an immersive space for viewer? Why does the memory of home after
immigration occupy a significant position, and in such a scattered form? Do other
people have similar experiences? Therefore, I begin searching for mediums to address
these questions. This is where my practice begin.

1. Memory Image
Memories are the traces of past experiences retrieved when needed, a pathway to
discover who one is. We gain the ability to learn, to develop knowledge, relationships,
and identity due to this information process system of our brain. It plays an important
role in establishing relationships between the past, present and future.
My paper will mainly focus on episodic memory, which is the collection of
autobiographic events occurring in a particular time and space. The term episodic
memory was coined by Canadian experimental psychologist Endel Tulving. In his
article “Episodic Memory: From Mind to Brain”,(2002) Tulving states that episodic
memory “makes possible mental time travel through subjective time, from the present
to the past, thus allowing one to re-experience, through autonoetic awareness, one’s
own previous experiences”(5). He also mentions, this “mental time travel involves
awareness not only of what has been but also of what may come”(20). Different from
other types of memories, episodic memories directly involve the subject. Under the
mediation of episodic memory, we are able to know our own life stories to form an
identity, and we can plan for the future based on past experiences. Also, these
episodic memories often bear one’s emotion attached to the experience. This concept
of mental time traveling reminds me how I create works through revisiting past
personal experiences to slowly unfold an image of home after I immigrated to Canada.
That image of home is composed of numerous episodes. Since I have the ability, as
10

most people have, to retrieve these memories, I am able to better understand myself
connected to a place, and feel more rooted there.
The initial reason that stimulated my interest in making art with episodic
memories is that I noticed they have not only cognitive and affective aspects, but also
visual and spacial perspectives from which I can translate them into visual language.
A common phenomenon in the case of recalling is how we recall visual
representations of that experience, namely the memory image. A memory image, in
simple terms, is a representation of something we have previously experienced. The
memory image can help us to “see” the scene of the event we are recalling. The
German sociologist and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer compares memory images
with photography in his article “Memory Images”. He states, “Photography grasps
what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is
given only in so far as it has significance”(46). According to him, memory images are
full of gaps, do not fully capture a frequent flow of time, but appear in fragmented key
frames.

Figure 1 The Tuesday Afternoon, watercolor on paper, 24 x 36, 2018

The work The Tuesday Afternoon I created in the spring of 2018 for the MFA
Interim Exhibition explores on the struggle of not being able to recall clear and
complete memories (Fig. 1). The memory images appear in partial and intimate
11

details. The work is comprised of three watercolor paintings on paper. Each painting
shows 88 squares in the form of the grid. The squared ratio symbolizes a cropped
proportion of whether landscaped or portrait format in traditional photography. The
painting provides details of my personal experience between 2000 to 2005 in my
hometown of Jiangsu, China. In the work I intend to reveal the quality of a place by
archiving memorable architecture, objects and intimate human interactions that form
episodic memories from my childhood. I created a list in my head including every
detail I could remember that could represent my childhood. The list could be a place,
name of an object, or symbolic imagery. I divided them into three categories and
placed them into three paintings, which are the environment, objects, and figures
respectively. Most of the things on the list could easily fit into the three categories,
only a few of them were indistinct. I decided to temporarily abandon things that did
not fit in the three categories, and save them for the future when I have a larger group
of them. In this sense, this is an ongoing project that I can always create more
paintings to join them. Some of the squares remain abstract as, for those personal
experiences, I have no approach to put them into visual languages yet. I amplified
eaves and iron fences, cropped everyday objects, close up on parts of body, claiming a
metaphor of fragmentation. I paint on small scaled squares scrupulously with my
breath unconsciously held, and with my head lowered to make my eyes focus on only
one block area, and so I can see clearly how the tip of my brush moves through the
paper surface. I paint a narrative that I repeat over and over again in my mind to
reveal intimate momentary episodes.

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Figure 2 The Tuesday Afternoon,detail, 2018

Figure 3 The Tuesday Afternoon, detail 2, 2018

I was inspired by Australian artist Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival. Both
the concept and the arrangement of drawings in the book resonate with me (Fig. 4). In
his article “Comments on The Arrival ” written for Viewpoint Magazine (reprinted on
Tan’s website) describing the idea and process behind the book, Tan shares that in the
research of migrant stories, he found “it was the day to day details that seemed most
telling and suggested some common, universal human experiences”. Also, he shows
an interest in a more fragmented visual sequence, which can capture a certain feeling
of uncertainty and discovery revealed in migrant stories. These two ideas facilitated
the initial structure of my work The Tuesday Afternoon, to paint close-ups of everyday
objects to represent memories of past day to day details and reflect on difficulties
immigrants face after their migration. In his graphic novel, Tan also lays out
numerous squared drawings on pages to form narratives. Some of pages contains 12
squared drawings depicting an action, to resemble how a storyboard of an animation
or a film shows movements. This type of arrangement invites readers to speed up in
order to get a consecutive flow of the action. I resonate more with the squares
depicting objects from the environment. In this way, these drawings give readers more
information on details of the character’s daily routine, thus adding to the narrative
from a different perspective.

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Figure 4

The Arrival by Shaun Tan, Graphic Novel, 2006

My ideas when constructing the project also overlap with the cropped
composition Belgian painter Luc Tuymans presents in his work. This form creates an
ambiguous collage of disconnected pieces and details. This composition signals
Tuymans’s belief that representations can only be partial and subjective, and meaning
must be pieced together, like memories, through isolated fragments.(Tate) In his work
entitled The Rumour, he shows a series of paintings of pigeons, people, and a cage,
and three paintings of pigeons’ eyes (Fig. 5). Through enlargement, cropping, and
editing, the eyes are elevated and dislocated from the natural world and the rendering
makes the object abstract and disappear. From one painting, readers are able to
generate other images by formulating and reformulating them. When people consider
the relationship between the images, they begin to construct a narrative and put their
own narrative approach into the understanding of the work.
Similarly, my work also aims to construct narratives, to fill the gap of memory. In
The Tuesday Afternoon, every square represents an everyday scene I retrieve by
recalling. As we know, memory images are not always preserved from the past
14

sometimes they are reconstructed into a different modality. We might see ourselves as
figures in a childhood recollection, and my work is created with this type of image
where reality and fiction can coalesce. In the book Remembering from the Outside:
Personal Memory and the Perspectival Mind, Dr.Christopher McCarroll also
mentions this phenomenon as “one see[ing] oneself from a visual perspective that one
could not have occupied in the past” and argues that memory can be constructive and
reconstructive but also accurate and faithful to the past (X). The use of the observer’s
perspective in my own work parallels this idea. According to McCarroll,
remembering a scene from a different perspective is the result of the encoding process.
I see this perspective as an interpretation of memory from a different standpoint, the
standpoint of the present. Putting myself in the picture of what I remember is a way to
reconsider the past experience.

Figure 5 The Rumour by Luc Tuymans, Suite of 7 lithographs encased in painted wood & plexi, with
wooden birdcage in four panels, 91.56x516x6.5cm 2002-2003

2. Home Place
Homes of the past often appear in the memories of immigrants.This is a kind of
psychological expression that occurs when people are facing life pressures and mental
tension. According to Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (qtd. in Datta), “home is both
a physical location and a set of feelings ... a process of creating and understanding
15

forms of dwelling and belonging” (55). When immigrants settle into a new place,
images of their old home, which bears a sense of belonging, appears to form a
contrast to the present situation. Salman Akhtar, an Indian immigrant psychoanalyst
who is practicing in the United States, also states that immigrants may have fantasies
about their old homes, about if they hadn’t left their home when they did, or believing
they will return home one day in the future (1065).
The French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs also addressed the
question of why immigrants are so attached to their old home surroundings in his
book On Collective Memory. From one aspect, one’s home surroundings that rarely
change provide an image of permanence and stability, which gives people a feeling of
order and tranquility. From the other aspect, the physical objects of homeland posses
significance because they bear people’s imprints, are evidences of evaluations and
comparisons which recalls for one’s older customs and social distinctions. Halbwachs
also puts forward an idea about how “the permanence and interior appearance of a
home impose[s] on the group a comforting image of its own continuity”(169). This is
the reason why members of a group still retain traditional costumes as souvenirs from
home.
I have a similar experience. As an adult, I still have an intensive connection with
my childhood home. Therefore, childhood memories are the main content of my own
works, which serve as a metaphor of the yearning for a no-longer existing home of
immigrants.
In retrospect, I often have memory images of me getting along with family and
friends at the old home place. Sometimes I “see” buildings and nearby environments,
and sometimes furniture and decorations in the old home. These memories make up
the image of a home, which is influenced by my immediate experiences. The
Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his book Space and Place
conceptualized the idea of how space is transformed into place as it acquires meaning
and definition. Place is “an archive of fond memories and splendid achievements that
inspire the present; place is permanent and hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty
in himself and chance and flux everywhere” (154). Tuan’s point explains a place as a
16

specific area that holds positive memories to people, and intimate experience can
devote to build these positive memories. These experiences can be humble events that
build strong sentiments in people without the need of any drama.
Tuan mentions an episode in Paul Horgan’s novel, a teenager proposes the
question “what moves us?” with answers: the vapor lights on the tall aluminum poles
over the highway create dizzying beauty when the evening comes, are the most
beautiful things in town (Tuan 142). I agree with this teenager, because I had the same
feeling that I often touched by things that are not planned but ordinary in life. This is
also the reason why everyday scenes and objects often appear in my own body of
works. These living objects are easily ignored by people since they interact with them
too often. However precisely because of this, these objects hold value and memories.
For instance, the traditional dish comforts an immigrant not merely because it
provides him energy to survive, but rather reminds him the security and stability
within the house with the presence of those he loves. Akht mentions, under the
migration circumstances, physical possessions, like family albums, books, and relics
etc acquire the status of “linking object” between old home and new home to give
immigrants emotional refueling (1062). The images of living objects also appear in
The Tuesday Afternoon function as links between me and my native land. Meanwhile,
the intention of making these objects exist in the form of paintings rather than entities
speaks to the absence of the physical objects.
I was attracted to the art piece Les Archives du Cœur, by the French artist
Christian Boltanski who is interested in exploring life, death, and memory in his
practice. This project is to archive recordings of the heartbeats of people throughout
the world in a permanent house. Many years later, people of different regions, colors
and cultures would use this remote house as the destination of their journey to listen
to the heartbeat of their loved ones, this action itself has becoming an important part
of the work. When people listen to the heartbeat of another person, the sound
amplifies the absence of that person through a trace he left to the archive. The
organized grid form in The Tuesday Afternoon also an archive, but collects only
virtual images to highlight the irretrievable time and place, leaving only traces.
17

Though my artwork points to the nostalgia for the old homeland, I am not
intending to reconstruct the past. The American sociologist Fred Davis in his book
Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia talks about how although nostalgia
draws from the past, it is clearly a product of the present. Nostalgia is always evoked
in the context of current fears and anxieties and looks to alleviate those fears by
"using the past in specially reconstructed ways" (11). What drives our mind to
reconstruct a memory can be referred to as the “hallucinatory seduction of [the]
imaginary” that French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre discussed in his book The
Psychology of Imagination, as “an incantation destined to produce the object of one’s
thoughts, the thing one desires, in a manner that one can take possession of it,” and “ a
way of playing at satisfying [one’s] desire” (177,179). In the case of diaspora, when
people mourn over their loss during the migration process they often elevate the
pleasant experiences in their old homes to prominence, and filter out painful
memories.
With the notion of the image of homeland as maybe only a reconstructed fantasy,
I aim to reconsider and explore the ambivalence of the real and fabricated content
contained in the image of home. My works show the subjective sentiments toward my
hometown and my dependence on the native culture. At the same time, my works also
aim to enrich the meaning of its existence by creating the intersection of individual
memory and collective memory, which serve as a way to connect an individual and a
community.
According to Tuan, “each culture has its own symbols of intimacy, widely
recognized by its people” (147). In my art, I deliberately place symbols, avoid being
cliched, to slowly unfold the lasting sentiment planted in the viewer by their own life
experience. I painted color bars on a TV4, spinning black bicycle wheels5, a
wall-mounted telephone6, and toys familiar to my generation. Though these objects
Begun in 1978, the China Central Television sets up a maintenance period on Tuesday afternoon
from 14:30 to 17:00. Almost every television channel during that period appears with a test pattern.
This regulation lasted until 1997, some local television station kept the maintenance period for a
few years longer. This becomes a collective memory of people who lived in China in that period.
5
Refer to the appearance of Phoenix Bicycle prevalent in 90s China.
6
This is a type of phone widely used for interconnection in a community.
4

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are directly involving my subjectivity, they serve as clues for people from my culture
to recognize the roots of the work. One of my viewer, who is an international student
from China, told me she recognized the color bar when she first time saw my work,
which reminds her the childhood memory of every Tuesday afternoon with the pattern
on TV. Then she starts to share with me an episode she remembered from her
childhood about a toy I illustrated in the animation and her feelings generated from
the memories. On the other hand, there are many symbols relate to general human
experiences. For instance, bicycle wheels, telephone lines, rivers, and stairs are
common in all cultures, when viewers see these things they can relate to the meaning
of links and transit between locations based on their own life experience. In this way,
I am seeking potential overlaps in the culture where I currently reside.

3. The Nostalgia of Time
After the first semester of my MFA, I began to notice that there was something
lacking in my watercolor practice. Memories involve experiences of time that cannot
always be translated into still images. In the summer of 2018, I began to search for a
new approach to explore how to create a virtual space which can intensify the
experience of time. Referring back again to Tan’s The Arrival, the use of consecutive
squared frames in one page to show movements facilitated my initial idea of turning
still drawings into animations. I was also inspired by the editor Ian Farr’s description
in the book Memory of how video installations transposed from cinema can create a
space within which
an intensified level of immersiveness, spectacular enchantment and
distantiation, through which culture difference, displacement or trauma could
be evoked and mediated in virtual sites of assimilated collective memory.
（Farr 13）
The darkness of the space where video installations happen can shut off the
distraction from the outside world for a moment when viewers enter and immerse
themselves. Instead of making film works, I decided to use frame-by-frame animation
as the medium. I see this medium as a form of film making that resists realistic
19

representations and highlights a subjective feature. The form encourages me to fill in
my interpretation and affective response to the historical experience. The creative
process of making an animation also emphasizes the one’s experience of time. Due to
the gesture of repetition and overlapping in the making process, the later images are
superimposed on previous ones to construct a summation of the past and present. I
share this idea with the animation artist William Kentridge, who describes the process
of making animation as “an accumulation of time” in a interview with Keli-Safia
Maksud. When creating frame-by-frame animation, every layer of drawing matters in
making a coherent animated instant. The parallel between animation and memory
gradually become visible; both are traces of history, extracting the past from the
standpoint of the present.

Figure 6 Snow, animation, 2018

20

Figure 7 Snow, view 2, animation, 2018

The work Snow(2018) was the first animation project I produced in the MFA
program(Fig. 6 & 7). This work has been projected on a wall in a gallery space. The
entrance was covered by a lightproof curtain in order to create a dark space isolated
from the outside world that viewer can enter or exit. This work consists of eight
animated scenes composed by one hundred and sixty-seven drawings. Each animation
is one-sixtieth the size of the entire projection, in the squared ratio adapted from the
watercolor piece. In my practice, the way of making an animation is to depict a slice
of the past and make it have a duration in real time. While making this work, I
considered how can I use the playing method as a different way of storytelling. The
work begins with a single frame in the middle. The frame disappears and reappears at
a fast speed, which creates an unfixed and flicking feeling. As the video plays, the
number of frames slowly increases to fill up the whole projection and creates a
chaotic impression. All of a sudden, every scene changes into color bars then into
static screens, they cut off audiences' expectation for more information as if the TV
lost its signal. The static television screen depicts “snowflakes” implanted in my
memory from when I was still a child. It contains a collective memory from before the
digital era when television was still the major media in the public sight. As the
researcher of Communication and Media and Aesthetic Dominik Schrey points out in
his essay “Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation” , “Media
21

can serve as a means of virtual accessing the past, and are thus an important resource
for cultural memory”(29). In my own work, the use of this image of a static screen is
intended to have viewers make an association with the old technology and memories
of the last century.
I use this snowflake image also as a metaphor to represent failure, the failure to
recall a proper memory, and the failure of being unable to access the western culture
when I first arrived in Canada, as these “snowflakes” frustrated people when they
expected to get information from the television.
Animation has a long history. The earliest hand-drawn frame by frame animated
cartoon was produced in 1908 by the French caricaturist Emile Cohl. The technique
developed rapidly in the past hundred years. The choice of this obsolete animation
technique in my own work, instead of a more advanced one, was made because of the
enchantment of the physicality of making the drawing frame by frame, and the effort
and attention I evenly paid to every single frame. Even when I am using advanced
technology, an iPad and an Apple pencil, to create digital drawing for the project due
the need of complete a large amount of work in a limited time frame7, I am prudent to
use the copy and paste function when making repetitive frames. This action also
represents a yearning to slow down and be self reflexive about the fast productivity of
digital media.
This retrospective celebration reminds me of Svetlana Boym’s idea of
contemporary nostalgia. Although the fast-progressed technology shortened the
distance between home and abroad, people in the twenty-first century still cannot
eliminate that painful feeling. On the contrary, the rapid development of technology
creates a contemporary nostalgia, the nostalgia of time. In the book The Future of
Nostalgia, Boym suggest that:
Nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and
progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or

7

The portability of iPad and Apple pencil allow me to draw anytime of the day. Lots of the
drawings were made in fragmented time of daily life, for instance when I was on transport, breaks,
waiting for a meeting, etc.
22

collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the
irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. (XV)
This nostalgia is no longer a longing for a geographical place, but instead, it is a
longing for the “slow rhythm of our childhood” (Boym XV). In other words, in an era
people oppressed by multitasking and managerial efficiency, they yearn to find
psychological treatment to deal with the pressure of time. People cannot revise the
flow of time in physical reality, but can achieve it mentally; as Tulving describes the
ability of remembering, “When one thinks today about what one did yesterday, time’s
arrow is bent into a loop. The rememberer has mentally traveled back into her past
and thus violated the law of the irreversibility of the flow of time”(2). Old
technologies, and people’s memory of them, become a mediator which can cause
people’s attention to travel back to trigger memories and emotional responses.
Figure 8 River, installation view, 2018

Therefore leading me to create work with obsolete equipment no longer used, to

evoke attention to the vanishing of old culture and technology, aiming to interpret the
melancholy and sense of longing for a place that has gradually vanished in distance
and time.
The work River (Fig.8) is an animation work I made later in the fall semester of
2018. This work is a combination of projected animation and automatic slideshow.
Both parts of the work are based on impressions from my childhood everyday life but
represented with different approaches. The word river in the title is a translation in
23

English of the first character of my hometown, Jiang Su, which refers to the Yangtze
River.8 Chinese culture characterizes rivers as “mothers” who gave birth to
civilization. This metaphor left an impression on me when I was a child, living near to
a river, and everyday I crossed the bridge with my grandmother. This ineffable affect
is ingrained in me, also in the creation of work. The word river also operates as a
metaphor for the phrase “the river of time” as a means to imply the irreversible flow
of life.
The animation is silent, lasts 2 minutes and 50 seconds, and is played on a
continuous loop(Fig.9). The animation expresses the intimate relationship I had with
the place I lived until I was ten, the employee family member community9 of the
hospital my mother worked in. Images change from a row of trees to a pair of
wrinkled hands tying up hair for a girl and continue change until they finally become
a river, back to the beginning, forming a loop. With the notion of the old homeland
has passed out of existence, I pierced by the nostalgia and the sense of loss. I intend to
convey this sense of loss and the irreversibility in my practice. While making the
animation part of this project, I did not redraw every frame, instead, I erased and
overwrote the previous one to create the next drawing. When the animation plays with
an extremely slow rhythm, audiences can see the gesture of erasure and altering,
which can draw their attention to the traces, the traces of drawings that no longer
existed, just like memories.

8

Yangtze River is the longest river in Asia, its river basin is home to nearly one third of Chinese
population.
9
This type of community formed in the planned economy period of China. State-owned enterprise
allots houses as a benefit for the employee. The experience of living in an employee family
member community has been a common memory of Chinese people for decades.
24

Figure 9 River detail(Animation), 2018

Figure 10 River detail (Slides), 2018

The slideshow, projected on the wall beside where the animation projects,
contains 40 pieces of 24 x 36 mm watercolor paintings printed on transparency film
and mounted with hand-carved slide mounts, shown with a Kodak slide projector(Fig.
10). The use of this obsolete technology speaks to the physicality in the making
process. Each slide mount was carved by myself with a x-acto knife. The gesture of
leaving traces on the material and fuzzy edges show in the projection both mark the
presence of the artist, suggesting the image from memories were artificially reshaped,
as well as provide an aged appearance to the slides. The time spent carving intensifies
the effort I put into the retrospect process as a ritual of cherishing one’s own heritage.
Some of the slideshows remind people of photos from a family album, and some
are more like glances in life. Warm and bright light pass through the routine scenes
printed on transparency to illuminate the space. The clicking sound of the projector
accompanies the whole playing process. Empty slides unevenly placed in the
projector intentionally create gaps between images as a means to frustrate viewers'
expectations when the equipment clicked but no new images appeared. This refers to
the gap between memories I mentioned earlier, to simulate the struggle when people
are aware of something is missing, but cannot be retrieve.
While two projections overlap in one gallery space, they supplement information
for each other. Viewers can also experience a perceptual effect while viewing two
parts in one space. The flashing bright light disturbs the viewing experience of the
25

animation which may create a visceral uncomfortable feeling. However, this aims to
highlight the vivid feeling of loss and failure, which is a metaphor for the feeling of
one striving to integrate into a new culture. Though the artist’s life stories are not
accessible to viewers, the aural and visual language they perceive provide them with
clues to the information. This ambivalence shapes a dynamic tension between viewers
and the work.
The project also creates a space where viewers can connect things they are
viewing back into their own life experience. Giving the freedom to viewers to
understand the work is also a key concept in completing the work. As Claire Bishop
stated in the introduction, “Viewers as Producers”, of the book Participation, “(...) we
are all equally capable of inventing our own translations.” and “(...) not divide
audiences into active and passive, capable and incapable, but instead would invite us
all to appropriate works for ourselves and make use of these in ways that their authors
might never have dreamed possible. ”(16) In my own work, no matter of my squared
watercolor drawings, animations, or projections, I intend to provide audiences a lot of
fragmented information at one time, they will have the tendency to fill in the gaps.
When viewers see an image of a girl talking on the telephone, and then a pair of feet
coming down the stairs, they may begin to think about the content of the phone call,
and the girl’s whereabouts. After being filled, the narratives often have meanings that
cannot be found in the separate existence of each frame, which are made up of
memories, knowledge, and imaginations of viewers and become a part of their stories.
In one hand, audiences’ reinterpretation speaks to an impossibility of reconstructing
the memories I called up while making the work. In the other hand, liberating viewers
from a resolved narrative is to give the work the ability to be narrated in a different
social background and identity.

Conclusion
Memory transcends the span of objective time and integrates the past into the
present. Through making animation installations, I attempt to create a space at the
intersection of individual memory and collective memory. Not concentrating on
26

memorial historical events or representative heritage of my culture, I put the spotlight
on humble, daily life, to reconstruct the past in ways ordinary people more likely
experienced. With the knowledge that memories are part fabricated hallucination, I
am interested in how and why we still find a sense of continuity in the relationship
between us and the past. From the affective aspect of memory, the connection
between a person and a place usually depends on the intimate experience and
relationships in the past. In my artistic practice, I use autobiographical memory
images as the starting point to create watercolor paintings and animations, which
shows my relationship with home, and roots in my personal immigration experience
in a dynamic picture. The interplay between inaccessible private information and
accessible perceptual elements gives viewers a dynamic relation to the work. The dark
cinematic gallery of projection-based works creates a space where viewers can
concentrate and immerse themselves. I am interested in creating visceral and
emotional responses to fragmented and vanishing visual language for the viewer. The
replay process of the animation and speed reinforce the sense of participation in time,
and the outdated machine involved contrasts in another way with the contemporary
concept of time in rapidly developing society. Overall, through my work, I intend to
highlight the uncertainty of memory from which express sentiments immigrants may
experience in their settlement.

27

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