“When three members of my family passed away, I missed the opportunity to see them one last time. The intense regret and remorse that had endured over the years became too much for me to let it go. The instinctive response to pain is to run away from it, but perhaps facing the wound will be the only cure. It wasn’t until I started talking to friends about the loss of those three that I realised that most people, like me, avoid dealing with the pain of losing the people they loved as a way to forget its existence.
Maurice Maeterlinck expressed a view about death in his The Blue Bird: There are people who have died, but as long as someone still misses them, they will live on as happily as ever. I began to visit the places where they spent the last days of their lives more frequently, talking about them more often, looking for traces of their lives, and eventually those traces and feelings that were recovered became a bond between the three of them and me. These bonds will eventually become the undercurrents of their existence in my world,flowing continuously.”
Yan Jialin, born in 1992, Fuzhou, China, where she’s currently based as well. Her work revolvesaround the lost memories and emotions from both individuals and groups, and intends to explorethrough images the process of abandoning memories.
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