Cinema Paradiso
video installation
The era of the video hall: the primitive era of the viewing experience is the collective memory of a generation of Chinese people in the late 1990s, and an old three-gun projector imported from Italy is the only physical evidence left of this memory. As a spectator who has always kept a distance from memory and reality, Yi Lian follows his friend to Yangjiang to interpret and rewrite this period of history from his perspective. Human memory is not always reliable, and the uncertainty of memory itself allows Yi Lian’s work to span time, imagining and reconstructing a history in the time lag between the present and the past.
When one sits down to look back at the video hall once run by the family, this memory becomes blurred and distorted as multiple versions are presented by different characters. People’s narratives are captured as images and projected through the physical evidence itself, like crabs on a beach and the light hitting them. There is a certain relationship and meaning between people’s memory and the reality in the past. I was also inspired to use “animals” as a metaphor for some of the unspeakable parts of the photograph, to give people room to think.
http://www.yilianart.cn/cinema-paradiso
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