“The Other Story” is derived from a show entitled “The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Postwar Britain” curated by the critic Rasheed Araeen at Hayward Gallery in 1989, which pointed to the “absence of non-Western artists in the history of modern art.”
Another “The Other Story” consists of three parts: in the video part, I played a “modern” artist, and the whole video imitated style of the black-and-white films in the 30s and the 40s. The document part embodies a photo archive of my father’s paintings created in various styles from the 70s to the 90s. I arranged these images with a series of texts on a document table. A portion of the texts comes from fragments of memory that I could still recollect about my father teaching me painting techniques, or from my imagination about my father’s youth. These texts originate from my personal imagination of that era. The third part includes two paintings of my father done in the 80s and the 90s. I used “Another” as a prefix to the title, just like the title of the video – “Another Modern Artist”, to make up a “modern artist” within my mind. Part of this imagination comes from my knowledge about my father, and part of which comes from my perception of the fragmentation or entertaining nature of “modern art”.
Detail pictures:
