Xu Xiner About CV Text Works Group
The Wind of Yesterday
2024
Installation
This piece stems from my contemplation of the tension between intimate family memories and the sweeping changes of time. At its core is an old electric fan that witnessed my parents' marriage, its breeze continuously blowing a lightweight plastic bag. Printed on this bag is the window of my now-demolished childhood home—a fragment of home extracted from an old photograph.
This still-functioning old fan breathes life into this fragile "home" with its dynamic motion. Yet, the plastic bag carrying the image of the window remains so light and unsettled. The plastic bag, an everyday, disposable, and fragile material, here becomes a temporary "container" for the imagery of a lost home. The image of the window on it, as a remnant of what was once a stable physical space and spiritual sanctuary, presents an unstable, distorted visual effect due to the bag's lightness and the wind's motion. This instability intuitively mirrors the non-fixed nature of memory itself—it is not an unchanging archive but a dynamic process, constantly diluted, distorted, or intensified within the tension of recollection and forgetting.
Through this work, I attempt to capture the loss and pursuit of individual experiences during rapid urbanization. Under the grand narrative of "development," countless physical spaces that carried individual and community histories are swiftly erased. When physical spaces cease to exist, how do memories find their anchors? When the past is constantly rewritten, how do we relate to our own history?