Drawn to Memory

1 Yi Lian

HANGZHOU

CRT video projector imported from Italy screens short vignettes of characters in a small room conversing in the Yangjiang dialect of Cantonese about the history of a family-run cinema. These scenes are spliced together with incongruous-seeming footage of other people searching for the elusive sand crab in the dark. The clunky, low-lying projector is perched atop a set of arachnid-looking legs—half the height of a visitor—in a sand-filled room reminiscent of a shoreline, and acts as an eye or the muddled “brain” of a sentient witness, relentlessly playing the out-of-order scenes on loop. Presented for the first time at Guangzhou’s bonacon gallery in 2018—and then later in the 12th Shanghai (2017–18) by Yi Lian is a commentary on inaccessibility and the falsity of narration in archiving experiences. The family featured is not the artist’s own, but his friend’s, speaking in a dialect incomprehensible to him. As a woman repeatedly questions her relatives, each time hearing a different variation on the same story, the futile activity of searching for the sand crab becomes a metaphor for recalling true information.