Iris Lingyu Zhang

             

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Talking to him

2025Multimedia installation  sculpture 
moving image(35’’loop) AI technology
Found objects, materiality


This is a multimedia installation combining sculpture, video, and AI technology, constructing a scene of desperate and false communication. Two rusted television sets and worn furniture form symmetrical sculptural groupings, with screens displaying a fictional family dialogue scene—ironically, all of this is reassembled from fragments: a broken sofa, a mottled coffee table, malfunctioning televisions, and AI-generated gazes that never actually occurred, created from old photographs.











The old television, as a relic of the analog era, once served as a carrier of authentic family memories, now transformed into a display window for digital fiction. AI technology constructs gazes that never existed by analyzing old photographs, creating a form of "hyperreality": far more perfect than reality, yet utterly false. This media displacement reveals a paradox—the more we rely on technology to correct the past, the further we drift from the authenticity of memory itself, becoming thoroughly pitiful.





As found objects, these items carry the weight of material memory. The old leather armchair recreates the power hierarchy of childhood family dynamics, with surface wear marks telling the story of an imagined family's history and damage; the coffee table exists in dependence on the sofa, yet reveals the possibility of independent existence in certain moments. The work reveals this subtle codependent relationship through the spatial arrangement of objects—the hierarchies and power structures between them are habitually defined, understood, and utilized by people.


I chose to include no sound art whatsoever in this work. In this silent space, silence becomes a present continuous tense. This renders the work's title even more ironic.

This piece points to a heartbreaking truth: everything is an illusion within power relations. Equality, symbiosis, independence, communication—whatever form it takes, it is nothing more than fabricated narrative, a utopian fantasy feast. The dialogue between my father and me has never truly existed, and never will.





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