I Forgot But You Will Remember extends Chai Mi's inquiry into interspecies fluidity, alongside themes of dreams and memory, separation and wandering, and the perception shared between humans and animals. Completed over five years (2020–2025), the work draws from a vast archive of ancient Asian paintings, deconstructing and reimagining individual memories and ancient imagery through handmade paper-cutting, collage, photography, and stop-motion animation. Notably, the stop-motion technique—imbuing inanimate objects with motion and emotion through frame-by-frame manipulation—embodies the artist's mimicry of living behaviors. The photographic elements originate from images Chai Mi captured during China's COVID-19 lockdown in a technology development park north of Shanghai. The narrative unfolds through the perspective of "Little Dog," a stray adopted by the artist during isolation, while the text derives from letters she wrote to her daughter. In the work, a voiceover lingers as plants and animals morph dreamlike. Memories and ineffable emotions coalesce into an intimate yet detached prose-poem tension, constructing a canine's vision of a city devoid of humans. Within this dream, the boundaries between species—both physical and cognitive—dissolve. Time folds upon itself, entangling reality with history, while memory stands firm against oblivion.
Chai Mi (b. 1985) graduated from the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, and currently lives and works in Beijing, China.
She works across moving image, photography, painting, installation, text, and performance. Her practice revolves around bodily experience, archival gathering, and a kind of conceptual and geographic nomadism, often uncovering visible clues and hidden relationships in everyday life to reveal their ambiguity and fluidity. She focuses on the dilemmas of individuals or groups across different times and spaces, exploring the connections between objects, living beings, and consciousness, while questioning fixed concepts and established norms. Her recent work reflects on the tensions between emerging values and civilizational heritage in an age of rapid technological development, and on hybrid, symbiotic states between humans, human made objects, and other species.
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