Wrong Phantom

“Polaroid’s instant photography”, an imaging-technology innovation of Polaroid corporation, is a method of automatically developing, fixing and revealing the photos. It became widely popular to take instant commemorative photographs right away. Yet with the alteration of media and ways of seeing, material media that carries images are gradually become archaic. The “death” of the instant film also indicated that virtuality , data, and digital memory are the new trend of image production and storage. During the creation process of the “Wrong Phantom” series, I returned to the darkroom and took the out-of-production and expired torn film paper as the material to write the negative film in an interaction between light and body. The chemicals are then pressed and jogged in a game-like way to produce the “wrong” and “crushed” images as the positive and negative images stack up. Touching these abstract and broken pieces of photographic paper is like soothing the pain and scars of the skin in my own physical experience, expecting to obtain the hope of spiritual healing in the "incomplete" images. The absence of the camera allows light to drift away from the traces of existence on the photographic paper, and allows photography to return to the medium itself. In the long and quiet creation process, I experience and perceive the temperature and touching brought by material images, instead of just the cold data.