EN / 中 About

Project 04

The Way We Played

Year
2024
Medium
Archival pigment prints, CRT video and sound
Installation rendering with thirty photographs dispersed across two gallery walls around a corner-mounted CRT television.
Man in glasses laughs while leaning toward a girl indoors, hands near her head.
Girl with glasses stands outdoors at dusk, wind blowing hair across her face.
Girl eats watermelon on a street beside a blue delivery scooter and a pole with smiley stickers.
Boy is held between two adults in a shop, reaching toward a woman's shirt.
Balloon seller seen from behind carrying clusters of colorful balloons with smiley faces.
Girl in a white dress walks through projected butterfly light on a dark floor.
Two children lie on a large glowing inflatable surface outdoors at dusk.
Boy with glasses holds a fishing net over steps by the water, framed by red ropes.
Adult crouches with an umbrella beside a seated boy on a lakeside walkway.
Boy leans on a blue rail eating a snack beside rocks and water at sunset.
Boy crouches by a lakeside curb, with an adult's legs at left and boats in the distance.
Boy holds red cloth below a Chinese school sign and a 2024 enrollment poster.
Four children stand with backs to the camera on a tiled plaza facing a distant adult.
Three children stand on a tiled plaza, one smiling toward the camera in a striped shirt.
Tall rocket-shaped amusement ride rises among dense green trees.
Small toys and figurines are arranged on a sidewalk beside a street with cars.
Blurred close-up of a child's face and torso, with hands holding small rectangular pieces.
Hands reach around a green mahjong table with an automatic tile machine in the center.
Plastic capsule toy machine filled with colorful balls, with Chinese text on the globe.
Child holds a toy rifle while an older boy in a red shirt stands close with a phone.
Boy poses with a toy gun in front of claw machines filled with plush toys.
Toy figures and carts are displayed on a market shelf under handwritten Chinese signs.
Colorful plastic fish and sea-creature toys float on blue water.
Close-up of a child's open hands holding yellow and red rectangular game pieces.
Empty bumper cars sit under a shaded amusement ride structure.
Boy smiles beside a yellow animal ride figure, pointing a small toy gun toward the camera.
Worn animal figures, including sharks and penguins, stand on an amusement ride platform.
Night scene of adults and children sitting on a bench, with one child blurred in foreground.
Blurred hand reaches toward small leaf pieces on dark pavement at night.
Two adults hold a smiling boy in a shop; one adult's hand holds a cigarette near his face.
I left Huizhou for Canada at the age of ten. In 2024, I returned to China after many years away and photographed children in parks, schoolyards, shops, streets, waterfronts, and amusement spaces. Their gestures and games sometimes recalled my own childhood, while their lives unfolded in a present that I could observe but never return to as a child.
At the center of the work is one of the few videos of my early childhood that remain, recovered from a broken VCD. It shows me at four years old, swinging a toy jingubang on a bed and absorbed in the role of Sun Wukong. In the photographs around it, children hold toy guns, trade cigarette-pack cards, play mahjong, catch fish, and throw rings toward rabbits in cages.
The Way We Played places the recovered recording among thirty photographs made during my return. The video plays on a 19-inch CRT on a shelf at child height, in the corner where two walls meet. The CRT presents the recovered recording as moving light and sound, distinct from the still prints, which disperse outward across both walls, following associations among objects, gestures, and relations between children and adults. The room holds three times at once: the boy on the screen, the man who came back with a camera, and the children photographed during my return, living in a present of their own. To watch the video I bend toward it.

Questions and answers

About this work

Why is the childhood video placed at the center?
It sits on a shelf in the corner where the two walls meet, at a child's eye level, so an adult viewer bends toward it. The CRT presents the recovered recording as moving light and sound, distinct from the still prints around it. The boy in the recording, the adult who came back with a camera, and the children photographed in 2024 remain three distinct positions in the room.
How does this relate to MT's larger practice?
It is MT's most autobiographical work and stands on its own terms. Where the systems-based projects examine how meaning is produced by machines, this one is about distance and return: a photographer who can occupy neither the childhood he recorded nor the ones in front of his camera.