In a recent meeting with some MFA students we discussed memory and its
function in creating art…. Making connections with personal histories.
In the 7/6 issue of the Wall Street Journal was a story
about the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang. The article said, “Memory is the
central theme of Mr. Zhang’s art – what we choose to remember, forget, or
distort.” Zhang went on to state “Art helped me transcend a miserable
situation.” Zhang studied western
art in one of China’s Art Colleges. The WSJ piece went on:
In
1989, Mr. Zhang painted a red woman sitting on the banks of the Lethe, the
mythical Greek sea of forgetting. Several months later he watched the student
protests in Tiananmen Square. By
that point, he decided to abandon the western motifs he had been exploring and
go hunting for some way to capture China’s collective identity.
He
found it in an empty box of cookies. While visiting his parents in 1992 after
his first trip to Europe, he noticed his mother dumping a batch of
Black-and-white family photographs into a leftover bakery box. As he sifted
through the images, he realized he had never seen himself as a baby or his
parents as their younger, livelier selves. He had just become a father himself,
and he felt more closely to the unfamiliar faces in the photos. The
juxtaposition proved to be his epiphany: China after the Cultural Revolution,
was one big dysfunctional family, too.
It is part of that personal connection that I was talking
about in looking for memorable events (or signposts) in your life. It is the personal connection that will
in the end make your work stronger. We often look outside ourselves for
direction, however, it is when we make the journey home we make big
discoveries…
