Golden Cricket Archive (金蛐奖), 2024
Discarded CDs, resin
Size variable
The Golden Cricket Archive is an installation work inspired by the artist’s childhood memory of cricket cages. It reconstructs a sensory “architecture” using old CDs found in drawers in the artist’s childhood home, exploring the relationship between memory and media. When DAI Shengjie and her parents moved out of the home they had lived in for sixteen years, she happened upon a large number of old CDs. These CDs contained childhood animations, nursery rhymes, English learning materials, as well as popular music, television shows, and films from the 1990s to the 2000s. As a once-prominent cultural product, CDs profoundly shaped how we viewed the world, influencing the entertainment and visual culture of a particular era and society. In The Golden Cricket Award, the artist engages in a dialogue with her past self and cultural community by collecting and organizing these CDs. This “emotional” practice seeks to explore the social and emotional value retained in CDs, a cultural medium now deemed “obsolete” by anthropocentric perspectives. The artist’s personal memories and experiences become a silhouette of the collective cultural memory of the era within the work. Continuing her focus on old objects used in global industrialization, indigestible elements, and the "afterlife of media" connected to community life, the piece reveals the enduring relevance of past media in the present.
