Pu Yingwei
Dusk Memories-Returning
Materials : Single-channel video
Year : 2018
Dusk Memories – Returing depicts a process of acquiring, recognizing and constructing memories. After experiencing the anxiety of reality, the trek of travel, and all the journey of searching, remembering and forgetting, the artist begins to doubt the firmness and clarity of the existing memories. The materials of the work are taken from the city of Marseille in the south of France. The artist also lives and shoots in that famous Unité d’Habitation in Marseille developed by the modernist architect Le Corbusier. This city is also known as the “capital of the end” by the artist: immigrants, collective architecture, and the exotic land of North Africa on the other side of the Mediterranean all reversely outline the identity of the art itself. At the beginning of the video, the artist borrows the introduction part from the diary of Japanese writer Michihiko Hachiya after the atomic bomb in Hiroshima to make a weather description. The turbulence hidden in the daily life becomes metaphor there. In a sense, “returning” means not only the reconstruction of the concept “homeland”, but also the permanent absence of the former birthplace, a kind of “modern exile”.