MEMORY: FORGETTING HERITAGE, REMEMBERING CHILDHOOD, & IMAGINING NOSTALGIA IN CHINESE ADOPTION
Sometimes, memories come back to me in dreams. Other times, dreams come back to me in memory.
Themes : memory, Chinese adoption, machine learning
Shanghai, China, Fall 2023
This project is an autobiographical photo essay reflective upon how Chinese adoptees construct memory, recount early childhood, and imagine becoming. I trained an image-generation model on a dataset of my own family photos captured on film during my family’s adoption trip in 2003. I then synthesized new photos that embody the fragmented, broken, and lost memories that arise from adoptees' often turbulent beginnings, rewriting what nostalgia means for me.
Full documentation
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Shanghai, China, Fall 2023
This project is an autobiographical photo essay reflective upon how Chinese adoptees construct memory, recount early childhood, and imagine becoming. I trained an image-generation model on a dataset of my own family photos captured on film during my family’s adoption trip in 2003. I then synthesized new photos that embody the fragmented, broken, and lost memories that arise from adoptees' often turbulent beginnings, rewriting what nostalgia means for me.
Full documentation
