Family Memories
© ZIWEI 子维
© ZIWEI 子维
© ZIWEI 子维
© ZIWEI 子维
Performance, Video
Family Memories is a short performative documentary exploring kinship, memory, and queer becoming through a staged encounter between family archives and embodied performance. The work centers on a video call with my mother, during which she narrates stories prompted by digitized family photographs. As she speaks, I perform a makeup ritual on camera—an action that unfolds in real time and becomes a site where generational memory, gendered expectation, and self-fashioning intersect.
Rather than treating family archives as stable historical evidence, the film foregrounds their gaps, inconsistencies, and affective force. The project juxtaposes my mother’s storytelling with an archival home video made by my father in my infancy, intervening in inherited narratives of gender, identity, and authorship. Through editing and performance, I rework these materials to question how personal histories are constructed, imposed, and remembered—particularly within a postsocialist Chinese context shaped by silence, taboo, and digital mediation.
Presented as a single-channel video accompanied by photographic wall works drawn from family albums and performance documentation, Family Memories proposes an intimate form of queer historiography. It understands history as something produced through bodies, relationships, and acts of re-arrangement—where alternative narratives emerge through performance.
Presentations
All In Our Language, The Gallatin Galleries, New York, USA
Installation View
The Gallatin Galleries, New York, 2026
The Gallatin Galleries, New York, 2026
The Gallatin Galleries, New York, 2026