Larry Li

For my thesis exhibition I present "The Home Is Red" “The Home is Red” takes its name from the Chinese revolutionary song “The East is Red” which was adopted as the non-official national anthem of China in the 1960’s. I recall my grandmother singing this song to my sister and I as children. Now as an adult with my grandmother currently in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, I find myself clinging onto this song with all its complexities. My troubled relationship to this song becomes the starting point of where all the works originate. A space of ignorant bliss and blind assumptions of familial and political histories. To think about the intersections of such histories, this body of work utilizes photographs of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre along with personal family photographs. However, the works do not aim to depict the events of the Massacre and its relationship to my family history with clarity. The paintings are drawn over, smudged, and obscured. At times Shifting between where the photograph ends, and the painting begins. The event of the Tiananmen Square Massacre becomes a platform for me to explore my assumptions and confusions about generational trauma, unknown familial narratives, and my proximity to a culture, history, and politics of a country I was never raised in.