Rusty memory
Brook Yanlin pursues a sense of personal independence while placing himself within the crowd, where reality and fantasy continually collide. His works carry nostalgic, slightly melancholic, and sensitive emotions. Within the atmosphere he creates, a quiet sense of helplessness emerges, revealing a deeper questioning of memory.
Against the background of an era shaped by the pandemic, his work invites viewers to reconsider their own position, direction, and relationship to reality.
The exhibition Rusty Memory focused exclusively on Yanlin’s early conceptual exploration of self-memory, without including other easel paintings. At the beginning of his practice, Yanlin did not create works as planned series. Instead, he worked from feeling, and only later looked back to organize and understand the works he had made.
“I create when I feel something. When I no longer feel it, I fall into a kind of depression. After that depression, I begin to summarize my past works,” he said.
锈忆 | Rusty Memory
Search and Reminiscence- A world of rusty memories
This exhibition takes the mirror as the starting point for exploring memories. The viewer will enter the rusty memory world in the mirror through the shadow of the branches.
Yanlin is first and foremost an artist whose thinking is rooted in painting. He often works with uncontrollable factors, allowing chance, material reaction, and accident to enter the process of creation. Although loneliness and alienation appear throughout his images, what matters most in his method is a certain openness to randomness.
He has always tried to move away from traditional constraints and follow his own path. Looking closely at these images and installations, one can see how carefully he examines the relationship between himself and his subjects.
Rusty Tree
Video, 2022, color, sound, 1’30”;
Installation, 2022, tree trunk and rust reaction.
People know that the life cycle of trees is very long and often use the branches of trees to simulate the conditioning of memory. Then this time, the artist took the tree as the original memory of the human brain, and the metal paint covered on the tree as a new memory. The metal paint will react with the air over time on the tree, and the final rust reaction is the reaction between the new memory and the old memory.
Memory Coverage|”Person”, “Object” and “Scene”
Photography-based mixed media, 2022
Inkjet print on paper with rust reaction
The artist thinks about the traces in the covered memory from the three aspects of “person”, “object” and “Scene”, and discusses the present memory, instantaneous memory, self memory, black-and-white memory, and deep thing memory.
