Imagery Reality and Illusionary Memory in Mixed Media

“Journey in Time” series are formed between 2001 to the end of 2003, through long periods of photo shooting and my reflection on the journeys after those remembrance adventures. In the phases of my work creation, the format of “Journey in Time” can be categorized as “internalized images of mixed media”, which abandons massive use of various materials but confines itself to the prime use of the old family photos. The images in these photos are then reprinted by kiln firing on separate tiles of different sizes to come up with the imagery tiles for final ornamenting with ordinary zinc-plated frames. Strictly speaking, the visible media materials are simply the photos and tiles or the pure images with the photos and tiles.

The black and white photos used in “Journey in Time” are “snapshot aesthetic” of my family life during ’50 and ’70. The imagery dots weave a memory network and transform to a highlighted and dramatically authentic climax because of the fluctuation in time and space and personal subjective selection. These old photos faithfully perform the mechanic mission of photographic recording. The shabby quality of these black and white photos comes out quite distinctively. The original photo negatives have worn out because of time or poor care that they become naturally deformed for further development; furthermore, the enlargements of these negatives are developed freely out of luck and skill of the technicians, which collaborate incidentally but naturally to bring out the seemingly ruined photos. These photos, intentionally deprived of quality control and flavored by abrupt discrepancy, are the wrinkles of time and the best spokesman of time.

As the rebuilt scenes are viewed from the perspectives of the 21st century, the inner layer of memory swung in the ‘60s, all the scenes, which I did not physically witness during my life journeys, have come fulfilled in the image exploration thirty years after in these works. The affectionate sentiments of the old times come alive in the reprinted images on the stiff and cold token of tiles; as such, a contrast between reality and memory exemplified them as two sides of a coin. These fifteen pieces of works in the series “Journeys in Time” cannot possibly roll up al the film of family episodes since the 1960s, neither can they contour all the landscapes where reside all the currents of memory for the past thirty years. Therefore, they are not titled by the clan name “Chen” of my family veins to reflect on my journey log; instead, they revolve as prose imagery around the inner immediate experience to flashback the journey. The fusion of photos and tile images bounces back to the present from the past, traveling in the viewer’s imagined chapters of interpretation and lighting up the viewer’s personal inspiration.

By no means, do I intend to innovate new image syntax to commemorate the forgetting-prone limited life; simply, I incline the image scenes, and ruminate on the world that I have realized.

Chen Shun-Chu 2004.1