What if I had a child
Date: 2024
Medium: Installation Sculpture + Photography / Printed Book
Materials: Foam, Foaming Paste, Carton
Scale: 100 x 40 x 60 cm
What if I had a child is a collaborative project combining photography and installation, centred on the idea of a fictional child as a way of imagining growth, memory, and intimacy. Instead of presenting a real child, the installation creates an abstract presence that photography then turns into something visible, tangible, and recordable. Set within the domestic space of the home, the work places me in the role of a parent, using photography not only as a narrative tool but also as a form of emotional projection and identity performance. The final work takes the form of a photobook, structured like a family album or childhood growth record. For me, the project engages both with personal childhood experience, family education, and anxieties surrounding future parenthood, and with broader social questions in contemporary China concerning declining birth rates, generational pressure, and changing attitudes toward family. Photography here does not simply document the growth of a fictional being, but also questions the authenticity of memory and the image’s power to construct emotional reality.