Return (2020-)

Laolao (maternal grandma) passed away in an August evening. While changing shroud for her, I could still feel her warmth, so real that death seemed unreal.

I used a thermal camera to carry out a remembrance ritual. I use my body to live as laolao once did at home, capturing traces of my own body, through which laolao's blood still runs. I trace the touch of my hand on laolao's belongings, thnking how she once cherished them. I stroke laolao's image in old photographs, just as she once held me in her hands, leaving her warmth on my body.

Laolao was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, when the Covid pandemic was spreading. Thermal cameras were widely used in public spaces across China to monitor people's biometric data as part of pandemic control measures. I transform this top-down, authoritative tool into an emotional medium to express my grief and contemplate life and death, while also visualizing time, memory and the photograph's punctum. Growing up in a typical Chinese family, where expressing love is often seen as embarrassing, I feel closer to laolao than ever.

Return (2020-)

Grandma passed away in an August evening. While changing shroud for her, I could still feel her warmth, so real that death seemed unreal.

Grandma was diagnosed with late stage cancer around the same time Covid pandemic began. I was thinking a lot about life and death, and how to preserve grandma’s memory with photography knowing she will leave us soon. Around the same time, I began seeing the world around me with thermal camera, a device that became widely seen in public space in China to surveil people’s temperature, and discovered its ability to record a person’s trace by the heat they left in a place.

I used the thermal camera to carry out a remembrance ritual. I used my body to live like grandma, and recorded the traces of my body -  in which her blood runs - on the furniture in her house, the traces of my hands caressing her stuff like how she used to dearly used and kept them, and traces of her existence in the old photographs.

I feel closer to her than ever.