Ying Yu

This body of work is a process of revisiting past memories. It is initially created out of a desire to preserve personal memories of temporary moments in order to claim my presence in the places I have travelled to. The subject is limited to places I have previously been to, to emphasise the idea of temporality. Unlike those places we experience in everyday life where we can always confirm our impressions and memory by revisiting them in person, all information about the time I spent at these places relies totally on my memory and the photos I have taken using my phone. 

It is not difficult to understand that photos can instigate our memory of relevant events and scenes we have experienced in the past, and sometimes photos keep more detailed visual information than what we can actually remember. Through a process of handling numerous photos, I question whether the clear afterimage of a scene is the impression of seeing the actual places or seeing their photos. As the action of taking photos is interwoven into the whole experience of travelling, the boundary in between memory of observing unfamiliar places through and memory of engaging with unfamiliar places through participation becomes increasingly blurred.