While today's media is highly advanced and fast, memories are increasingly retained with a composite characteristic; they are also spread and hinted at by the "authentic historical experiences” of the parties involved and through various media files such as film, video, publications, words, news and reviews etc.
Among them, photography is the most direct and imaginative carrier to suggest memories. In one of Feng Yan’s series of works about the public articles during the period of socialist construction called “The Monuments”, with a method of austere realism, photography as a means has expressed a cross-reference topic of public history and personal memories. These works include museum black leather stool, Mao style sofa, fan, shelf, clothes rack, file cabinets etc. Feng Yan deliberately severed the associations of these items with the surroundings, placed in a single seemingly careless and casual background, and photographed them as portraits from front, profile and back angles.
Memories and histories are always linked, and histories could become the most convenient grounds for eliminating or produce memories. People who have experienced the period of socialist construction would not be unfamiliar with those objects that have been locked with Feng Yan’s camera lens. When the fate and histories of countless personal experiences were tied with those lifeless objects branded with the mark of history filling the minds of the public, they became a part of the collective memory. “Favoring faded details and slipshod architecture, preferring personal and public spaces pregnant with implied meanings through subtle metaphors and dimensions of works.” With these images, the artist has transcended the quotidianness of these items into items of immortality thus shaping the polarization between the individual and public.
What is Feng Yan’s intent? Is it only to bring out these carriers of memories that we might have ignored? Such is not the case. Monuments have always carry two themes: one is concerned with the notion of immortality, and the other is related to the concept of power that never gave rise to the association of individual existence. In the past, our memories were manipulated by history, newspaper slogans, and revolutionary watchwords that propped up these ordinary objects into the altar of immortality. Individual memory as a collective consensus had emerged as the existence of "legitimacy." Through this series of works, Feng Yan expresses his social awareness through his personal involvement as a premise; with continuous observation, he infuses his full knowledge of societal and historical progress with rational cognition and judgement.
July, 2011
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