Memories on Ginkgoes, 2024

Ginkgo leaves, thread, acrylic on plexiglass, fishing line
Approx. 9’ x 8’ x 3.5’

This installation is an interactive piece made up of suspended acrylic paintings on plexiglass, hand sewn gingko leaves, and shadows projected with moving light sources. Viewers can use their phones or flashlights provided in the installation to interact with the piece and create moving shadows of their own.

Artist Statement:

My dad often tells me about the big gingko tree that used to grow in his family’s courtyard (it now grows on my mind). Physically separated from this setting, ginkgo leaves have become canvasses for creating my own stories about family and heritage. The leaves are sourced from different places I call home at this point in my life: Pitt’s campus, my apartment in Pittsburgh, and my parents’ house. The paintings are both personal and generic, real and imagined depictions of stories from my family. Moving across the wall, I want the projections to become ghosts of memories carried within/hovering above/projected onto the leaves.

The labor of sewing the leaves together was embedded with a cultural notion of care, as well, for something that will inevitably age and dissipate, something fragile that is like memory and also like identity. It has made me begin to think more deeply about this utopic idea of the motherland, and, in turn, the politics of romanticizing this.

Lucy Zhang

Artist Statement: