RESEARCH OF LOST TIME - YE FUNA INSTALLATION & VIDEO EXHIBITION (solo)

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EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

About Research of Lost Time - Ye Funa Installation & Video Exhibition
by Guo Xiaoyan

A Youth Curious About History

What we called history or memory, for us individuals, seems to hold two meanings: the first is finding a way for understanding our personal identity from our "past": the second is to make use o the "past" to help us understand better the reality to which we is confronted. If we push the former to its extremity, it might develop into a notion of destiny and lead us to make history our burden; if we do the same for the latter, then history might on the other hand become a possible tool to help us change the world.

Ye Funa's works leads us into history. When we are confronted to changes in someone's life, what we see is a limit, a border: a person's "history" seems to come back eventually to its starting point and the spiritual link between predecessors and successors is the historical one. Young artist Ye Funa begins by an introspection into the meaning of herself as a "political destiny", starting from the observation of her family members and from their historical "overlapping layers". She inserts the image of herself as a character among the historical photographs, turning time into fiction through the blurring of their outlines and the mixing of their contents - and "me", "rehearsing" or "escaping" among this series of historical photographs, I am cruising without a starting point or a final destination. Then again, what is the meaning of experience or historical narrative for "me"? If our life did not precede some other people’s lives, and vice-versa, why should we try to get closer to history, why should we crave for it? Ye Funa's intention is not to "hook up" people and history in a picture from an expanded epistemological point of view, nor does she want to be emotional or to bear witness to anything, but rather she’s trying to excite the prejudices of the viewers towards the identity she defined for herself, and to project it back onto the viewers: her replacement of the images in an historical context questions the limits of "me", while at the same time deliberately creating a burst seam of an involuntary and silent laugh, turning it into a "machine for thinking."

Ye Funa's reflections on this issue must have started when she was a graduate student: she wrote her thesis on the visual symbols of China's ethnic minorities. Her interrogation was on how the historical narrative is turned into a recognized visual symbol: in the narrative about the internal situation after Liberation (that is, about ethnic minorities), how could what was written become a consensual memory that everyone could share? The production of such a collective memory, not only consists of imaginary common characteristics about the native, but also and more importantly of common experiences, history and memories. On this, Yu Funa puts some questions: what kind of language system and visual system, under which conditions, makes the basis for the aesthetical view on ethnic minorities such a universal concept - in "Nationalities Pictorial", ethnic minorities women wear all kinds of "scenic costumes" to portray their daily lives, thus conveying all types of hackneyed clichés. This reflexive attitude, for a young artist who attaches great importance to the dimension of historical thought for her own intellectual construction, is very meaningful. We need to sort out precisely our understanding of the political realities of the times, and we should as well look at the significance of history in today's life; in the final analysis, all the discussion about the art and practice are inseparable from the discussion about life and practice, what we need to open up is the Way of Life and Art. Determining our own problems and displaying our possibilities through the imagination we use to solve them, that is the subject of young people. As a young debutante artist, Ye Funa turns herself on her own initiative into a "historical curious youth" (in the words of Qiu Zhiji), and this goes to show that art does indeed develops itself in the intellectual differences of every individual.

Apr, 2012