About ​

    My grandfather joined the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, was de-individualized under fanatical political propaganda, and committed inhumane atrocities along with others. After Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, he finally realized how terrible what he had done was. As a result, he spent the rest of his life filled with remorse, waking up from time to time with nightmares and suffering from PTSD.

    I grew up listening to the stories my grandfather told me, but he always kept his mouth shut about what he did during the Cultural Revolution. And whenever he talked about the Cultural Revolution, his expression would become grave and his voice could not stop trembling. This made me curious about this political movement that happened decades ago.

​     As I grew up, I realized that both my elders who had experienced the Cultural Revolution and the history classes in school were very secretive about the topic of the Cultural Revolution, passing it over only in passing. I gradually learned about the real Cultural Revolution through some books and articles that were banned by the government. I was deeply shocked by the brutality of the movement, and even more surprised by the fact that it was taboo to talk about the history of the movement.

    Learning about history is not only about understanding what happened in the past, but also about reflecting on it and learning the lessons so that the painful experiences will not be repeated. But how can we reflect if we have to deliberately hide even what happened in the past? So, together with a few of my classmates, Xiru Du, Muren Zhang, Hansheng Wan, Shiyuan Chen, and Moyang Song, I created this project. We created a series of documentaries, where each episode begins with the story of one person's family, reflecting on a historical slice of modern Chinese history.

    Every narrator’s parents come from rural areas, so the context of the family history they are narrating took place in an environment vastly distinct from the urban landscape where they grew up. In one documentary about a story in early 20th-century China, animations and short videos of random people walking in the streets are included, embodying how teenagers in the 21st century imagine past events and incarnate their feelings through generic internet images. In another video about a student’s family history in Inner Mongolia, many photos taken in his hometown are shown in the sequence of seasons and times of the day. In this video, while such a practice would bring the audience to the context of not the story itself but where the student heard his family stories, it also asks the narrator to contemplate how landscape bears symbolic meanings based on what the audience knows. For instance, I used paintings of Mao Zedong, which could be seen everywhere in my grandfather’s village until now, as a symbol of the Cultural Revolution’s lasting consequences.

​    The project “From Family Tales to Incomplete History” is not a reminisce and preservation of the past but an investigation of how the current is an ongoing, incomplete history. It is incomplete because it only contains specific memories of the past that are occasionally reminded and combined with current landscapes, whether digital, natural, or artificial. It is also incomplete because whether against violence, oblivion, or nature, our history requires us to steer and look forward.