Images have become crucial carriers of individual and collective memory today. Yet increasingly mature and accessible image-making technologies also make the production of false images easier than ever, turning the distinction between truth and fabrication into a difficult problem.
In A Memo to a Higher Place, images that are real or false, handmade or compiled, are permanently sealed in the same commemorative bronze material. The work keeps the ambiguity of the image intact, but shifts attention toward the gesture of preserving it: perhaps truth and falsehood have never been the essential question; what matters is the act of commemoration itself.
Process notes
The work translates the instability of digital images into a slow act of commemoration. Rather than leave an image circulating as a file, a feed, or a proof, I engrave it into bronze and hang it with a wall drawing — so the object reads less as evidence than as a memo, a record addressed to some uncertain higher place, made from images whose status is never settled.
Behind the plates a wall drawing repeats a single body outline; the bronze plates themselves carry a portrait grid, an image warning, a machine companion, a horse and rider. Real or fabricated, drawn by hand or compiled by a machine, each is given the same heavy, lasting surface — until the question stops being whether the image is true and becomes whether it deserves to be kept.
Exhibitions
- 2023, Oubliettes sous ma peau, Zeto Art, Paris, France (FR)
Links / references
- Diffusing Durable Art - Entretien avec Liu Guangli Interview context on Liu Guangli's image-making, memory, virtual worlds, and historical distance.