yi jia ren (a couch in bensonhurst)

a couch in bensonhurst

This book contains eleven iterations of the same family photograph of a mother and baby sitting on a couch, with a grandmother looking over from the right side. The ghost-like shadow of the figures are etched on to a red bedsheet and the images are sequenced in the order of increasing abstraction. As the viewer flips each page, the fibers in the etched image are increasingly weakened, embodying artificial decay and disintegration.

This sculpture acts as a “future artifact” by taking the form of a family album. On this couch, I spent my formative childhood years doing reading homework with my jiejie, falling asleep to my grandparents watching wuxia dramas at night, fighting with my late grandpa over how many hours I should watch television.

The cover says “yi jia ren”, meaning “one family” which is the name of our group chat containing me, my parents, and my sister. The puffed fabric, inner board lining, and trimming were chosen to invoke nostalgic colors and upholstery found around the house.

These repetitions are in part inspired by these voicemails my mother has left in my phone for the past ten years. I have hundreds and hundreds of these clips years apart, but in each, she always says the same thing (my name, did I eat yet?, when am I coming home?). There is a clear repetitive pattern even if you don’t speak our Chinese dialect.