HUAIYI DU

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“The Forgotten Fields”

2016  -  2020
My childhood spent in an industrial town in the northeast, and now I still remember the scenes of heavy snow, morning fog, factory, train steam, but that memory is intermittent for me. When I was ten years old, I left my hometown and went to live in the South of China with my parents. After more than a decade, the childhood memories were profound and vague for me, and the warm and full of security days seemed to be covered with snow forever, and it looks like all of these were stayed in that winter. In order to wake up that memory and feeling, I have searched for some traces in my hometown: abandoned radios, old diaries, broken factories... I thought it would be a return to a naive childhood, but I found this memory always to be the puzzle that can’t be completed. It is unrealistic to embrace the past when my consciousness cannot be integrated into the torrent of the past. Later, when I began to restore these gradually blurred pictures and emotions in my memory via photography, I realized that they are not in childhood, nor belonging to the present, but existing outside of time.

 I started planning the shooting of this group of photos from the end of 2016. Most of the photos were taken at night because of the dark environment gave me a feeling of separation and security. Later, in order to increase the expression of memory, I began to blur these scenes by lens refraction, grease application, etc. For me, this is the original memory of my mind, it exists, but it is always vague. Later, I discovered that no matter how hard I try to hug the past, I could not revitalize the complete emotions and pictures. On the contrary, I found that the motivation for shooting always came from the my distant childhood memories. After that, I began to understand that memories do not need to be retrieved. They have been integrated into my body and consciousness. After 2017, my shooting range is no longer limited to my hometown. I started to travel around the country and the shooting direction changed from “memories” to “remodeling”. The next shooting after that , I started using the flash to make the original silent scenes vivid. From the passive search for memory at the beginning, to the spontaneous emergence of them in the end, the memories of me, it began to bloom again in another way.

 I named this group of works " the forgotten fields", not just the memory of the Northeast. I know that my hometown has changed in the moment I left, time has ruthlessly promoted the process of urbanization, and all of what I was familiar with will fade away. But it is important to extract what I think is precious from my life and let them be expressed in a unique form.
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