Chen Qiulin – Peppermint

Peppermint by Chen Qiulin (*1975 Yichang City, CHN), spreading on the first floor, is about a specific memory – an intangible, unfading essence of the past. A telephone call and a photograph of her old martial art team took Chen back to the summer of 1983. Like an involuntary Proustian memory, this discovery brought back memories, which has long been overshadowed. Through her personal history, the artist appeals to our basic human experiences and asks the existential questions of who we are and how we have become what we are. For Peppermint Chen went back to the places of her childhood to visit her former team mates. Her works are not only studies of her individual past, but also of our general relationship with the past and the passage of time. The installation remains in a state between past and present, expressing an uncertainty about the truth of memory and our imagination of the future.