Feng Meng-Bo, My Private Album

1996, interactive CD-ROM

Born in 1966 (Beijing, China).  Graduated from the Beijing Central Art Academy.

In the ' 80s China faced a torrential challenge of reformation as the nation opened its door to the world. The arts were no exception. Undergoing an avant-garde movement, contemporary Chinese art is far away from the uniform style of socialist realism. On the other hand, many Chinese artists still take a traditional stance, integrating international trends with tradition. Feng is a leading new-age artist who arrested public attention during the turmoil.

Turning away from the exaggerated importance given to art, Feng poured his interest into pop art, with the computer as his medium of choice. Computer games, which were beginning to sweep the whole world, became the tongue in which he expressed himself. History converted into electronic signals symbolized the ideological games of the Chinese social system. My Private Album is a piece of interactive multimedia art made after his electronic games. With sound effects, the computer screen presents a family album, varied documents, and voices from the three generations from his grandfathers' to his own. Through his family, just an ordinary Chinese family, the artist intended to present the varied faces of people's lives and attempted to reconstruct the modern history of China.

The artist describes the ever-changing phases of China in simple techniques and from a third-person viewpoint. Here, the computer is the medium, though, viewers do not get a mechanical impression but rather one of traditional values. With constant clicks of the mouse, viewers enjoy protean digital images and unconsciously become assimilated into the images, as the artist intended. The artist reminds us that in this digitized era we still keep our analog sense, as we turn each page of his old album. And such reminiscences are the greatest of treasures.