Yuhua Bao

Moon in The Water

8 resín skúlptúrar bók og myndbandsvörpun / 8 resin sculptures, a book and a video projection

2022

I have had the same dream plenty of times in my life.

It happened the first time in high school when I was exactly the same age in my dreams. I have this nightmare at least once a year. However, I have not grown up during that time in the dream world. 

It begins with the sound of a bell ringing and dusky light coming from several small windows. I am walking on a spiral staircase with my sister in a huge library full of books. I cannot stop myself from touching and looking at them. At the top of the wall, there is a wide black clock with the hands pointing half-past ten. Suddenly, I realize there is someone in black chasing us. We have to run fast to lose the person and the stairs turn into an endless spiral. With the footsteps closing in, we are frightened, and my sister falls down the stairs. There are two different parallel universes as I try to help my sister in almost half of the dreams while I keep running in the rest of them. It was so real that I feel my sense of self-preservation was triggered every time I had this dream by the contradiction of the images and the tense atmosphere. As a result, I woke up crying and felt released from the nightmare.

I view my childhood trauma as a result of social, familial and political changes. The background and environment where I grew up has a strong influence on my practice, with many of my dreams set in my childhood. It explores how dreams are affected by trauma and investigates the possible impact on addiction. The fragments in my childhood dreams are not only memories but also offer approaches that help interconnect and illuminate essential aspects of my work. 

I also found my memory is a little bit different from the words I noted down. With time passing by, the gap between the recordings and my memorization became wide and complicated. It seems my memory has become obscure, mixing my imagination and dreaming scenes. Reconstructed and distorted images are created in my mind as I try to remember things more clearly.

For the past few years, I have experienced this looping dream and began to rethink its hidden meanings.

Dreams are fragmentary collections of disparate images, which convey narratives and stories unconsciously. These dreamscape images give me inspiration and I approach them as material to recreate patterns, narrative and meaning. I question how trauma works on our experience, the comprehension of dreams and why we find it so hard explaining them.