Happy Old Wu

_{^{Multimedia Installation；Materials: MDF , Acrylic, Aluminum Alloy, Adafruit TSC2007, Resistive Touchscreen, OLED Screen, Arduino Mini, Battery}}

Happy Old Wu mirrors this dynamic preservation of memory. A small OLED screen, housed in a cubic box, responds to touch—triggering a shooting star that cascades across an electronic photo, transforming fragments of a family archive into fleeting digital recollections.

In many rural homes of my hometown, family photos are not kept in albums but inserted into large frames—landscapes, portraits—hung high in living rooms, moving with the family through generations. My grandmother, Wu, assembled such a frame over twenty years, layering images from the 1960s to today—film prints, mobile photos, even TikTok screenshots. Bound together in a single frame, these images defy personal chronology, forming a shared visual history in our home space. Memory, here, is not an individual act but a communal presence—an accumulation of moments held together by the landscape they inhabit.

_{^{Large family album created by My grandma Wu}}

_{^{Family Photos on the album}}

Thirty years ago, my grandmother repurposed the frame of a landscape painting—gifted by my aunt at my mother’s wedding—into a family photo album. Along the painting’s edge, the inscription “Mountains cradle rivers; life blooms where they meet.” graced the canvas, though my illiterate grandmother couldn’t decipher it. The ebb and flow of the portraits nestled before the landscape seemed to perpetually echo this sentiment. It wasn’t until this year, amidst a personal project, that I truly noticed the inscription. Now, in my twenties, I find myself granted an opportunity to converse across time—a chance to heal our entire family. From the deepest layers of the album, the willow catkins of spring 2008 emerge: my grandmother’s blue knitted sweater billowing in the wind, my eldest aunt’s gray hairs yet to thread through her dark locks, and my shy cousin concealed. At the forefront stands a younger me, adorned in a pink baseball cap, with green caterpillars curled like jade rings on the budding willows behind. My recollection is faint; I merely remember the splendid weather that day and my fondness for that pink cap. Perpetually introverted and self-conscious, often shying away from the camera, it was the first time I allowed the world to glimpse my face—a moment my grandmother printed and cherished forever.

_{^{The inscription “Mountains cradle rivers; life blooms where they meet.“}}

_{^{The Aurus D1000 Discone Antenna is a multifunctional antenna well-suited for a broad spectrum of radio frequency applications, covering an extensive range from 25 MHz to 1300 MHz.}}

Mounted on a discone antenna, known for reception but weak transmission, the piece reflects the paradox of memory: received, displayed, yet often unspoken. Through its interplay of image and material, the installation explores how we hold onto the past—The work does not offer definitive answers but instead provides a space for contemplation, where memory is not fixed but fluid—just like the land it emerges from.

_{^{3D Modeling of a cubic box}}