Gallery Where

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.