A happy family is but an earlier heaven (2024)

is a time-based media and an installation piece. The media itself consists of a 2' 24" length video and 6' 48" length audio playing on loop, originally displayed on an old television in gallery.

Looking at these moving images, you may understand where my obsession with lens-based media and archiving came from. Ever since I learned how to edit videos, I’ve been going back to these thousands of home videos created by my father with the attempt to make something meaningful out of them. There are no tears in the videos, only laughter and excitement. I wonder what had prompted the urgency in him to record every wholesome moment in our daily lives. Was he aware that time, happiness, and home are slipping away like sand through our fingers every time he pressed the recording button? When and why did he stop recording? Was life too harsh to be documented on camera by then?

These moments of happiness are long lost in my own memories. They are as surreal to me as Apollo 11 landing on the moon, only proven by footage. Underneath the nostalgic sentiments lies my questioning of the reliability of memories and visual archives. I created this montage as a complement to my photo book, Home: A Trilogy, as the missing pieces in the puzzle.