MEMORABILIA

TIMES ART MUSEUM, BEIJING + CHENGDU, CHINA 2023

Memorabilia expands on the concepts introduced in Remember Me, a project that examined the full life cycle of a tulip in real time and highlighted the collective intensity surrounding its brief existence. The installation turns toward a fundamental truth found in nature: only memories remain. The work translates that idea into physical form through laser-etched crystal bricks — a material commonly used for memorial objects. By embedding imagery from Remember Me into crystal, the installation reflects on permanence, ephemerality, and the human impulse to preserve what inevitably fades.

⚘ Stop and smell the flowers ⚘

The crystalline materiality and internal light emphasize the tension between the fleeting nature of all existence and the human desire to make memory tangible.

Betta fish frequently appear in Afterlife Films s as a way to confirm the physical reality of the underwater landscapes—demonstrating that the scenes are not CGI but built environments captured in-camera. Its presence in Memorabilia serves the same function, grounding the immersive space in the living world and reinforcing the continuity between the digital, the physical, and the real.

Behind the memorial lies an immersive digital installation. A full LED wall displays selected works from the Afterlife series, originally filmed underwater. A mirrored floor and a shallow water pool sit at the base of the screen, creating the illusion that the flowers continue to exist within a living aquatic environment. Light, reflection, and movement fold into one another, dissolving the boundaries between digital imagery and physical space.