Bye-bye

a children’s bicycle—an object poised between flight, voyage, and grounded motion

Yu Ye 2023
Multimedia Installation
Materials: Canvas, Children’s bicycle, Wood, Thread, Metal picture frame, Stamp, Paper

How do we remember what we’ve never truly known? Bye-bye explores the fluid boundaries between memory, imagination, and cultural intimacy. Drawing from childhood imagery—objects tied to a time before our perceptions were fully shaped—the work attempts to access a shared, pre-linguistic space of recognition. Nostalgia, however, complicates this effort: it sweetens the past, obscuring as much as it reveals.

At the center of the installation is a children’s bicycle—an object poised between flight, voyage, and grounded motion. Suspended between realities, it gestures toward both departure and transformation, evoking the universal archetype of setting sail from home. Influenced by Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie and Goodman’s world-building theory, the project extends beyond the sculptural, incorporating photography, illustration, and text. These varied mediums merge into a fictional traveler—an imagined figure on the cusp of leaving, embodying the tension between personal memory and collective mythology.

By intertwining material presence with speculative narratives, I wanted to question the role of memory in constructing reality. Is what we recall shaped more by experience or by the cultural frameworks we inherit? And in this act of remembering, do we seek truth—or simply the comfort of a familiar story?