In 2024, I had a candid conversation with my mother about both her and my past significant romantic relationships. The experience revealed resonant similarities in our lives, giving me greater empathy with my parent as a child, while also reminding me that ultimately, it is impossible to truly know a parent’s past life. This body of work work is the result of that conversation and a meditation on memory and multiple kinds of intimacy.
Using archival family photos, the artist shows her own search to understand her mother’s past. Beeswax clouds the surface of the images while also secretly holding incised written words. Repetition of images recall memory and storytelling, as the artist depicts herself (in the bottom left of the right panel) creating in order to understand.
This trace drawing was a central part of the film Can We Talk About David. The artist created the image by tracing a photograph of her mother and her mother’s ex-fiance repeatedly, layering each drawing on top of the previous one. Time and space collapse as the labor of drawing each iteration is made evident and presented on the same plane.
Zoë Dong 