Tian Mi Mi is an endeavor to recreate a single film still of the music video of Tian Mi Mi (or Sweet as Honey), a 1979 Chinese song by Teresa Teng. In that image, according to my memory, Teresa, in a long, white dress, sits on the rear seat of a bicycle (or tricycle), turning around a bit with a slight, enigmatic smile. I first saw the video in childhood while going through my mother’s album collection. Many years later, that specific frame came to my mind out of nowhere. I wanted to see it again, but could not find that music video anymore, which made me urgent to transform that memory image into a physical photograph.

 

I carefully reconstructed the scene according to my memory, and directed an amateur performer to repeat the same actions again and again. I shot a 26-minute video with a VHS camera, then watched it frame by frame, intending to pick out a single film still that was identical to the one I remembered. The attempt, however, turned out only to be a failure. I gradually realized the memory image is not the same as a physical image, the details of which can be fully, accurately represented by pixels. The memory image seems only to be the clearest the very moment we recall it. The harder we try to recall, the more elusive it becomes.

 

What is presented to the audience here are ten photos in two groups (the three photos in the second group focus on the facial expression). To me, each of them is “quality-wise” correct to that memory image, yet none of them can fully represent it. The ten tangible, visible film stills together form an intangible, invisible thing——the memory itself.