The three collections that I have are candy boxes for physical objects, drawings of my dreams, and a series of photography of Chinese political propaganda.
What’s funny is that I didn’t make any effort to collect 25 candy boxes. I’ve already had over 50 of them since I am so in love with this kind of candy. In fact, I didn’t even notice that I was collecting them I just don’t want to throw them away because they look so cute. So I am so glad that I can actually make use of them.
For the drawings part I was determined that I want to collect my dreams because a lot of my inspirations came from my dreams. They are sometimes so absurd that I don’t even know why I would have them, and most of the time they surprised me by all those amazing ideas and I feel it’s such a waste that I don’t record them and use them for my future work. But the process of recording them was actually quite hard because sometimes you just can’t remember them after you wake up, or don’t know how to visualize them with drawings. So during the winter holiday I spent a lot of time sitting on my bed trying to remember what I just dreamed of.
I didn’t want to collect political propaganda at the beginning, but it was the anniversary of the establishment of my province so I could see them everywhere when I was back at home so I was thinking, why not just photograph them and use it for my collection project for they are all in the same style which is quite different from the commercials. The funny thing is that I saw them everywhere when I didn’t want to see them but when I needed to photograph them I realised that there’s not that much of them and it’s kind of hard to find 25 different pieces of them!
I didn’t think of any connections between my three collections. They are so different from one another and I was looking forward to seeing what kind of links I can build.