ChenXueling
Artwork
Editorial
Commercial
Digital Work
Books
Contact
CV
All content copyright the artist. No commercial use without express written permission.
Enthusiastic & Sensitive
2017-2022
2017-2022
When it comes to memory, I seem to only retain how things felt. The details often slip away, and the people in my recollections drift about with blurred faces, silently walking or watching. These fragments echo like hollow sounds—faint, trivial, and elusive.
Through the intervention of thermal printing, I attempt to return these images to a deliberately ambiguous and unreadable state. Black-and-white dots densely cover the surface, stripping the images of their realistic qualities and blurring the boundary between memory and reality.
These photographs span from 2017 to 2022, a period in which I transitioned through three phases: student vacations, post-graduation drifting, and working life during the pandemic. Revisiting these images after years, I repeatedly filtered, erased, and reprocessed them through thermal techniques, in an attempt to reconstruct a version of the past and re-identify the moments of confusion buried within memory.
During those scattered years, I explored cities and nightscapes with young people from different places, yet always felt as if I were floating—suspended between romanticism and uncertainty, typical of that age. Without the intervention of the camera, much of it might have slipped into unreliability. Fortunately, fragments remain.
The prolonged isolation during the pandemic deepened my reflections on the instability of memory and human connection. In some images, I removed the central figures entirely—leaving only empty silhouettes and the surrounding environments, as a way to explore a lingering sense of disorientation, illusion, and quiet powerlessness.