I Forgot But You Will Remember
Chai Mi
Gallery Where, Beijing
- Title
- I Forgot But You Will Remember
- Gallery
- Gallery Where, Beijing
- Year
- 2025
- Duration
- 18 min 55 s
- Format & Technical
Color, sound, HD video, 16:9
- Contact
info@gallerywhere.com
- Chai Mi, I Forgot But You Will Remember (still), color sound HD video, 18'55", 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
I Forgot But You Will Remember extends Chai Mi’s inquiry into interspecies fluidity, alongside themes of dreams and memory, separation and wandering, and the perception shared between humans and animals. Completed over five years, the work draws from a vast archive of ancient Asian paintings, deconstructing and reimagining flora and fauna imagery through paper-cutting, collage, photography, and stop-motion animation. The narrative unfolds from the perspective of “Little Dog,” a stray adopted by the artist during her isolation in China’s COVID-19 lockdown, while the text is drawn from letters she wrote to her daughter. In the work, a voiceover lingers as plants and animals morph dreamlike. Memories and ineffable emotions coalesce into an intimate yet detached prose-poem tension, constructing a canine’s vision of a city devoid of humans. Within this dream, the boundaries between species, both physical and cognitive, dissolve. Time folds upon itself, entangling reality with history, rendering oblivion inevitable.
Stills
Chai Mi (b. 1985) graduated from the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University. Her artistic practice integrates moving images, photography, painting, installation, text, and performance, continuously exploring the hidden relationships in everyday life through the lens of personal identity and experience. Her work reveals the ambiguity and fluidity within these connections, often blurring the boundaries between humans and other species to examine possibilities of hybrid or symbiotic existence.
Chai Mi’s recent exhibitions include: The Stars Outshine the Moon, Gallery Where, Beijing, CN (2024); 22nd Donggang International Photo Festival, Donggang Museum of Photography, Seoul, KR (2024); “Unfinished” Chinese Contemporary Photography Exhibition, Chengdu Art Museum, Chengdu, CN (2023); Diriyah Biennale: Feeling the Stones, Experimental Preservation” Unit, Diriyah JAX Art District, SA (2021).
Recently, she received the Jin Hongwei Collection Award at the Three Shadows Photography Awards, and her video work “1993-1994” is collected by the Ministry of Culture (MOC) of Saudi Arabia.
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Gallery Where
- Address
- 6 Tieyingnanxiang Alley, Dongcheng District, 100010, Beijing, China
- info@gallerywhere.com
- Website
- gallerywhere.com
Gallery Where was established in a historic building in Beijing in the summer of 2022. As a contemporary art gallery dedicated to exploring East Asian culture, Gallery Where strives to trace its cultural origins while examining future directions within this cultural framework. Our mission is to document how artists employ timeless artistic practices to present voices and construct discourses that are rooted in both Oriental traditions and contemporary perspectives.