Every object is a vessel of memory—fragments, connections, ruptures, and reconstructions. Time is not linear but a layering of intersecting moments. To flip through, to touch, to gaze, to forget. My photography is an archive of time, a way of awakening. Memories do not vanish; they hide within the folds and the play of light and shadow.
Anna Fox
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Thanks for all MFA Photography students from UCA during 2022-2024.
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Email: kouka0604@outlook.com
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The artwork “Liminal Space” is part of the project “Another Goodbye”, a deeply personal response to the death of Kangyue’s mother, documenting her grief and the fragmented memories that remain. Drawing from her mother’s belongings—especially her scarf, which serves as a medium to awaken her emotional memories—she explore the lingering presence of loss and the invisible bonds of love that continue beyond death.
Inspired by the Japanese aesthetic concept of mono no aware (物の哀れ), Kangyue reflect on the transient beauty of life and the quiet melancholy of impermanence. Using the photogram technique, she imprint traces of memory, creating images that exist in the space between presence and absence.
In the post-digital era, Liminal Space invokes the tension between memory, reality, and dreams, questioning the blurred boundaries between death and life. Through this work, Kangyue seek to reveal the hidden wounds of intimate relationships and the complex, inescapable emotions that remain.
The concept of Liminal Space is the best way to express my confusion state of grief after a traumatic event occurs. In its theory, individuals can recall past experiences, feel emotional resonance, or experience a vague, unresolved state. So I experimented with a range of media, such a s creating visual poem by photogram with material objects and texts, recording audio sounds and making moving images.
Finally I made an experimental film as a composite vehicle to present my final graduation project. The nature of its editing can encapsulate the temporality and fragmentation of traumatic memory. The occurrence of a traumatic event is not in itself threatening to the human spirit, but rather in the repetition of memory flashbacks over and over again. It is like waking up from a nightmare.
This project was inspired by a family photo album left by my father when he moved, but all the photos in this photo album were taken away, leaving only the inside pages. I found that the yellowed inside pages of the photo album have empty spaces for placing photos (with a word Photo on it) and are marked with the E size and L size. The text "photo" but without the real photos reminds me of Rene Margaret, "This is not a pipe", who uses surrealist concepts to challenge people's understanding through similarity. I took photos of the blank space with the text "photo", which inspired me of the relationship between images and objects. At the same time, watching this image, I produced countless images about the photo in my mind.
Rachel Whiteread's work made me think about the negative space of photos. With the popularisation of photography, images exist in various forms and become no longer rare. What we see through photos is framed by photographers, and we hardly pay attention to what happened outside the frame. I want to look for the missing parts outside the image, so as to reflect the impression inside the photo rather than external appearance, thus gaining insight into the emptiness inside things by ignoring their exterior.I have therefore named this project The Negative Space of Photos.
I was also inspired by Anne Collier, who turned the image into a printed object and aged it according to the original colour of the inside pages of photo album, which looked like an old, oxidised postcard to symbolise the passage of time. Postcards are the most common objects in our daily life. The postcards, which were widely used in the 20th century, were used to carry people's emotions and memories. But in the digital age, postcards are being replaced by virtual objects online, so that people's emotions and memories have lost their carrier and become short. So I defined the product of the interweaving emotions and the fleeting history as "the negative space of photos".
Going back to the purpose of our original photography, whether it's for a souvenir or as a record, if we don't look at the photograph, we may not remember what we went through. In contrast, people could only develop photos by hand and save them as souvenirs. Now the photo is gradually losing its physical nature, replaced by electronic data. So I selected 36 photos of my father's youth, remade them with my phone, and then used the smart key function in the mobile phone software to erase the main character from the photo, deliberately streaming traces of modification, and finally leaving only the background that we often ignore. On the one hand, it alludes to the innovation of photography technology and electronic photography, and on the other hand, it is a metaphor for the youth we have passed and the memories and emotions waiting to be awakened by photographs.
I put the 36 photos I sorted out and looped them in the iPad's album and sealed the iPad in a frame of broken glass with tapes. This broken glass picture frame is also a clutter that my father left behind when he moved, and I use it as a display device to refer to my broken original family and the past that I cannot go back to. These scene spaces with vague traces are like our vague memories, and now we can only make up for the emotional spirit we seek in a simple and virtual way.
postcard, 82*120mm, 89*130mm
The Negative Space of Photo, 2021
Installation, postcard display stand,
postcards,150*33*33 cm
Installation, postcard display stand,
postcards,150*33*33 cm
36 re-film photos, digital, 2021
This zine serves as an intimate exploration of grief, memory, and materiality through a deeply personal lens. Inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of “mono no aware”, it embraces the beauty and impermanence of loss, weaving together visual language and personal memento archives to construct a fragmented yet poetic narrative of remembrance.
Through imagery drawn from nature—waves, raindrops, sunlight, and ice—each page captures the ephemeral and fragile emotions of mourning: the serenity of acceptance, the brokenness of sorrow, and the vulnerability of longing. The interplay of archival materials, such as my mother’s letters, vintage photographs, and handwritten inscriptions, becomes a form of storytelling that blurs past and present, holding space for the traces of the lost.
The visual and textual elements in this work do not seek resolution but rather embody the complexities of grief as an evolving dialogue between presence and absence. By documenting these deeply personal yet universal emotions, this zine invites reflection on how memories persist through material objects and fleeting moments—remnants of love that refuse to fade.
Copyright © Zhang Kangyue. All rights reserved.