Recover from Oblivion-Together Again by Hsing-Chia Hsieh

Issue 168

Recover from Oblivion-Together Again is a series of works about collective memories and the media changes in family archival images. It is an extended project of my handcrafted book Recover from Oblivion.

After three years in the U.S., I visited my grandparents’ house in Taiwan. In the garage, I found an old cabinet overflowing with family albums. My grandfather passed away when I was 4 years old, so I barely had memories of him. I started to rephotograph photographs. Using images from my family albums from the 1980s and pictures of Facetime screenshots with my family in the 2020s, I layered photographs and created juxtapositions to narrate a mixture of truth, fiction, and memories. From past to present, memories intertwined, seeing the photographic media changed over time, disregarding what medium we use, one mutual thing that makes us take photos from all time is that we want to remember and be remembered.

Hsing-Chia Hsieh (she/her) was born in Taiwan and lives and works in Savannah, Georgia, USA.
hsingchia.com | @riantlove