70” x80”, Ink jet prints, photo by Hua Jin
Absent Husband is a performance that consists 12 pieces of 70’’ x 40” photographs exploring failure in marriage through reconfiguring personal memory in order to mend and translate emotions. In photographs, wife is on the left and husband is on the right. Absence is a form of presence. The wife wears the husband’s clothing to present his absence. The couple’s separation is revealed through dividing the husband and the wife in two photographs but in the same settings. In fact, the husband is the wife, and the wife is the husband. They are like a mirror not only reflects each other, but also is each other’s destiny. The white background functions as a healing light that soothes the trauma of loss; this empty background provides a purified void space where ordinary everyday marriage life flow like a dream.
These photographs are evidence of constructed reality that blurs boundaries between private and public, between subject and object, and between art and life. The body in this work is a deeply felt expression of subjective reality that I use to confront with the pain and loss. This work transcends personal experience and reality. It is an embodiment of a melancholic longing for an unrecoverable past and a memento mori constantly reminding the inexorable passage of time.
