In July 2019, due to my mother’s surgery, I left Shanghai, China, and returned to my hometown. This is the first time that I have lived with my mother again after many years of growing up and living away from home.

However, a few months later, in early 2020, China encountered the new coronavirus. During that time, there was a short period of warmth after returning home, but it was also accompanied by uneasiness. In this era, my hometown and I are unable to integrate, but I have to live here. I wondered about the uncertainty of my future. I made a photo album “Monologue” based on the physical and mental feelings that the external environment brought to me at that time.

In this self-talking “dream”, the story is no longer concrete and the narrative is no longer linear. What is heard and what is seen no longer correspond one to one. Everything here, I am in it, but reality and boundaries are blurred. These images are like incisions in memory, connecting the past and the future.

The cover of the photo album is of my father, and it was the last photo I took of him before he passed away. I tried to tell him this “absurd reality dream”: to seal or thaw a scar.