MEMORY DRIFT

Memory Drift draws on travel photographs, sound, and personal records accumulated by Zhiwei Bai since 2014. Incidental landscapes encountered while travelling, recurring symbols, and fragments of sound were initially kept like diary entries, then later recalled, recombined, and printed on aluminium. His preference for aluminium and modular structures is connected to the industrial materials and electronics culture familiar from living in Shenzhen, but these materials do not function as illustrations of the city; they become conditions through which memory can be reorganised.

The project has continued to evolve as an installation since 2024. In its first complete presentation, eleven aluminium works and eleven sound pieces from a parallel archive corresponded in number without forming one-to-one pairs, allowing visitors to construct their own relations between image and sound. For the 2025 Songshan Lake version, the project expanded to thirteen aluminium works and used the positions and movements of reflections on the water as data shaping sound. The 2026 Buji version returned to Bai’s family history of transport: metal, water, motors, and grooved aluminium brought memories of markets, loading activity, and container impacts back into physical sound.

These versions are not reduced to a single technical mechanism. Studio sound, lake data, and mechanical vibration remain distinct, allowing earlier records to keep changing through each new site. For Bai, memory is not something to reconstruct intact, but something that forms new relations whenever it is recalled, arranged, and made present again.