Father's 1927.12.03 - 2010.08.27: at Eight O'clock Fifty-One Minutes and Fifteen Seconds
Li Lang
黎朗
Production date
2010-2013
Object Detail
Media
archival pigment print with pencil hand writing
Measurements
106.5 x 108 cm
Notes
Li Lang’s series, ‘Father’, was three years in the making after the death of his father in 2010. Each work in the series is an act of mourning, of memorialisation and of tribute. Each black and white photographic print is covered with tiny numerals, representing his father’s dates, representing each day of his father’s 82 years, which Li says adds up to 30,291 days. Li Lang wrote an artist’s statement when these works were exhibited in Hong Kong, explaining that when his father died, he saw his life reduced to a set of numbers – birth and death date – on his tombstone, separated by a hyphen. He wanted to erase this bleak shorthand punctuation and record every single day of a long, rich life – a process of restoring meaning. Li said: ‘I would be ashamed to let my father’s life diminish into numbers. I wanted to show every day of his life. I had an idea to write each of his day on the photograph I took, because every day is important to him.’ In this photograph, his father’s watch is stopped at the exact hour of his passing: ‘I can still remember everything that happened on the night of 27th August 2010. To me, this act of writing is a subjective revisualization.’
Accession number
2018.111