Present Tense Biennial: Chinese Character (2009)
Maleonn
Nostalgia No. 8, 2006
C-print
"----To my distant youth and Utopia.
Countless moments when I pressed the shutter, my eyes ran over with tears. In those images, I, a kid without hometown, finally saw my nostalgia.
The most pitiful sadness of the human spirit has already taken roots in everyone's life. It grows up in the continuously fading moments, and eventually deposits in the yearn for those already disillusioned things. The reason for the nostalgia for the remote hometown is that you can never go back. Even you could go back in forms, the completely different way to the hometown must be suffering. All the traces have already gone, or will finally vanish, because of time.
Just like in this vulgar age, we are doomed to set off on a trip, which is far from our spiritual native land. We go counter to that, and disappear afterwards. Then, the pure smile of the leaving youth, the lost and broken love, the way that cannot back down, and the lonely hurricane, the nights and the desolate dream, the endless distance, and the weak horse of ideal, will finally be mercilessly shattered by time, and grinded into smokes and ashes. In the most private corner of everyone's heart, it gradually piles up to the secret pain permeated in the deepest feelings, and to the heavy nostalgia.
While the first drop of tears poured down for such sad emotions, all those unforgiving children like me, climbed up to the pile of the bones of time, walked along with the far horizon, finally have seen our own native land." - Maleonn
Abridged from Maleonn's diary on August 27, 2006.
Present Tense Biennial: Chinese Character
May 1 - August 23, 2009
Chinese Culture Center
San Francisco, CA