Artist Book By Ruiyu Chen

This project explores memory and human nature.

Memory is a distorted projection of past events. Our memories are not truly accurate; each time we recall an event, our brain adapts the information to fit the new environment, distorting it. We can never remember anything objectively.

By the end of the day, facts are removed from our memory, leaving only emotions. An important person in our memory is, ultimately, just a collection of emotions.

This reminds me of my grandma. I grew up with her, from the time I was born until I entered college. Essentially, she is present in all my pre-adult memories.

But now, when I think of her, I can no longer remember the details about her or the events that happened. When I look back, everything is just emotions with some “facts” that may not even be true. My grandma, who was, and still is, an important part of my life, has become part of the collection of emotions.

After reflecting on this, I also delved deeper into the concept of grey, which symbolizes ambiguity—a grey area. I realized that nothing is clear-cut, just like each of us. We’re neither entirely good nor bad, but a mix of both. We’re all grey.

This, again, reminds me of my grandma. In my memory, she is ambiguous. For example, I don’t know if she hated or loved animals, if she disliked or loved my grandpa, or if she hated or loved her village. She did things that seemed to prove both, and at the same time, denied both. With all these twisted memories, I can never truly know who she was.

But one thing I am sure of is that she was grey, like everyone.

This led me to my concept: A book of my memories about my grandma. I wrote down events from the past, accompanied by blurry images that reflect my emotions. Finally, when readers reach the end, they will be told that everything they’ve read was not true.

I chose to use the cyanotype technique to create the entire book because it is a method that uses shadows to create images, and the process itself twists reality. The bookbinding method is dragon scale binding, which allow the content to be exposed to the readers to mimic the impression we hold about memory – it’a a library to access any events we want.

Other than the book, I also knitted a container to hold my rolled-up book because my grandma used to knit sweaters for me every year. Additionally, she used to hang an egg around my neck in a similar knitted bag every morning before sending me off to school.