Memory: Inside & Outside

Jan.15, 2023


In the very first chapter of The Thirst for Love, Yukio Mishima writes in words that will stay with me.

“Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.”

― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

I didn't understand what he meant by "eternally transparent blues and greens”. I don't know when it seemed that I could no longer find such a stirring landscape in my memory, that everything had become grey.

In the autumn of 2022, when I came to England to start studying photography, I opened up a memory from two years earlier, a small film filled with memories that I had never looked back on and dared not look back on. This was the beginning of this project.

This project "Inside and Outside" was originally my illustration project three years ago, in the summer of 2020, exploring the boundaries between the visible and invisible, focusing on the search for self-identity and self-belonging. However, for various reasons, I not only stopped the project but also gave up painting, and these photographs, which were originally used as research for my illustrations, have become an opportunity for me to find the light again.

Born in Japan, I left Japan at the age of four to live with my grandparents in China due to the breakup of my parent's divorced family. Japan, which was supposed to be the first home of my birth, became such a strange place. The absence of my parents during my childhood upbringing made me feel alienated and alone when I returned to live with them. As a result, the images I have captured are filled with these intentions. There are empty places, unnoticed corners where my presence is present.

I see what seems to be a foggy sea, trees standing alone, unattended street corners that grow like weeds, like the philosophy of life in Lu Xun's "The Scream", like the sky in Edvard Munch's "The Scream". That loneliness and loss engulfed my soul, I had nowhere to go, no sense of belonging, and my only exit was to escape into light and shadow.

And so photography became my breath, allowing me to look at the world from the muddy room I was sunk into, and not at myself, so humble, small, and transparent.

I was searching for myself while chasing the light. It gave me the courage to face the broken self and the unchangeable past.

I had never imagined that the grey world of the past could gradually become brighter because of photography. Nor had I felt such clarity and blueness when I revealed these inner worlds.

Although the world is tearing at my soul like a wild animal, it cannot stop me from becoming a better version of myself. This is the final part of what I wanted to express in this project.

Just let the memories stay in the past.

Kangyue Zhang