Colored Sand paintings
Jennifer Boyuan Han
California College of the Arts
All of the works are made entirely of colored sand. This series began with a box of family photographs taken between 1997 and 1998, when I was one or two years old. I belong to one of the last generations whose earliest memories were preserved through printed photographs than digital images. I barely remember the moments shown in these images. The child in the photographs feels both familiar and distant, like someone I am still trying to understand. Through my sand paintings and surrealist poetry, I reconstruct fragments of memory that exist somewhere between reality and imagination. As an artist born in China and later moving to the United States in 2014, I think about identity through absence, distance, and cultural memory. Returning to these family archives is a way of searching for traces of my roots and asking who I am becoming.