Erasure
2011 | Fine art archival print | 40 X 28 inches (101.6 X 71.1 cm) | Edition of 3 + 2 AP

Erasure revolves around my aged parents and parents-in-law in their seventies and their photographs taken during a family trip to Tokyo several years ago. The series title refers to my painstaking act of fading their images from the photographs with an ink eraser as a graphic portrayal of how life quietly empties itself from them. The resulting faint images becomes an urgent testimony of their slowly fading existence from this world, as well as from my life. Ironically, they are resurrected in my emotional space as reawakened memories by the very act of erasure - at once emotionally torment and intimate. Despite the joyous association of a holiday destination, this work speaks of my own uneasy anticipation of their final destination - death.

This dread extends even to the contemplation of my own death. Their fast aging faces become a reflection and questioning of my own mortality - a question I first asked myself many years ago as a child of four: what will happen to me when my parents die? This thought haunts me till this day.