Ziyi Zhang

Artist’s Statement About the Work

Family Photo Album (FPA) builds on the premise that the artist’s bestie, a Chinese international student who studies art in America, abandoned art, leaving behind her body of works about her collective family memories. FPA is thus an interactive browser-based curation of bestie’s body of works that explores how her background impacts her relationship with art.

One of the overarching themes of FPA is truthiness, which questions the notion of reality in two ways. Firstly, by taking advantage of viewers’ preconceptions—physical space and photos entail realness while virtual space and renders entail fakeness, FPA challenges viewers’ intuition of truthiness by existing simultaneously in a tactile and digital space. Secondly, the project raises questions about the different perceived truthiness of historical, personal, and fictional narratives. Is history the truest? Or is personal narrative less subjected to censorship and thus the truest? Or does fiction speak a larger truth because it reveals the essence of the world we live in, which reality often obscures? How can one tell which is which if the artist doesn’t make it clear?

Another theme of FPA is the cultural and generational gaps from the perspective of bestie, who first came to America at a young age. As a new, affluent China stands on the shoulder of a starving China, bestie stands on the shoulder of her parents and grandparents. Although bestie is fortunate enough not to have experienced the hardships of her ancestors, she faces new challenges that are unique to her generation, which are masked under the abundance of resources and technologies. Bestie also has to navigate American culture, which is foreign to her ancestors. Bestie thus represents the merging point between Chinese and American culture, giving her unique insights on both sides, yet she is not authentic enough for either side, making her both privileged and underprivileged at the same time.

FPA’s third theme explores the relationship between money, class, and art. It questions whether art has a place in the absence of these factors, and whether someone can pursue art when there is an expectation to achieve them. Bestie quits art because she realizes the hardship of an art career and the financial burden her pursuit of art puts on her parents. However, she takes a black-and-white view of the world and believes that if she cannot excel in art or if the journey doesn't meet her expectations, then she should not do it at all. The project raises the question of whether bestie will return to art.

— Ziyi Zhang