Portrait of the artist at 8 years old. Gelatin silver bromide print, blood painted on wood and readymade pillow, wall inscription.
GB’s dedication to his mother, hand written on the wall of the gallery in La Source, is not executed in Chinese or his adopted second language of French but in English, which establishes a distance from the immediate impact of the event; it is an imperfect non-literal translation.
The memorial, arranged like a stele, vertical in its orientation, comprises a rent block of wood, beautiful in its tonality, hues and textures, tragic in its fissures. In contrast to the obdurate wood is a pillow, representing the comfort and intimacy of childhood, and his grade school portrait. Finally, there are a few industrial wooden boxes. It would be a mistake to be too literal in reading these images, to deconstruct the mysterious allusions to events long gone and never comprehended. Like a memorial, the lining up of the parts in a vertical fashion alludes to a portrait, to the ancient commemorative historical stele inscriptions carved in stone in China.
Dr. Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky