In this three-channel film installation, threaded with photographic archives, the artist draws on his grandfather’s memories of conducting the feasibility study for the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, capturing vignettes of Shanghai’s headlong modernization. By the turn of the millennium, the streets of the artist’s childhood were almost unrecognizable, yet in the interstice of those fragmented recollections flickers the spark to reimagine alternative destinies for the TV tower and for the futures it came to symbolize. 

    Layering moving images with memory, the work opens a cinematic space where past, present, and speculative futures collide heterochronically. It asks how sweeping state narratives seep into the intimate grain of family life, while revealing the slipperiness of personal testimony in the making of history. Adrift in the currents of modernization, the artist continually positions and displaces himself, treating history as a fluid continuum to enter, dismantle, and dream anew.