Chu Yin-Hua, ‘Invading Memories’
In March, 2009 Chu Yin-Hua received an invitation to visit Tokyo Wonder Site as an artist. She took a map with her, planning to use ‘engaged memories’ to interpret the city by means of making a series of associations – Omotesando in Tokyo = Sloane Square in London = XinYi District in Taipei,
Shimokitazawa in Tokyo = Brick Lane in London = XiMeng Ding in Taipei.
But things just did not turn out as planned. The more she tried to ‘shape’ the everyday excursions with her walking, the more she realised that the city was not as described in the guidebook or represented on the map. There was another dimension to it. The streets, the buildings, the traffic, the crowds - all those elements were superimposed together to create a rhythmic structure. Chu Yin-Hua then started her ‘documentation’ project, which she called ‘Invading Memories’. She used miniature architectural figures as main characters and took pictures every 4 hours - every day at 10am, 2pm, 6pm and 10pm. Through keeping such a regular visual record of the city, she used the medium of photography to trace the everyday routines, to scrutinise the daily banality and to sketch out or even invent the ‘memories’ that she was preparing for the future ‘her’. The memories were then again ‘invaded’ by new encounters, as she traveled from city to city: Tokyo, Taipei, Paris, Singapore, London…
Yin-Hua is currently working on her PhD thesis in the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster. Her practice-based research is titled ‘Staging Memories: Mise en Scène Imagined Cities in Photographic Practice’. It investigates how the medium of photography plays an intermediate role between the physical environment of cities and an individual’s psychical space.
http://www.chuyinhua.com
