The Cat Garden Reading Club is a motion-based work that transforms an oral family story into a cinematic tapestry of image, color, and rhythm. Drawing from a personal narrative of clandestine friendship and forbidden books during China’s Cultural Revolution, the piece transcends spoken memory through layered visuals that blur documentary and dream.
Through textured overlays, shifting palettes, and fluid motion, the work conjures the emotional gravity of quiet defiance, intimacy, and historical weight. Visual rhythms evoke the quiet heroism of sharing knowledge under surveillance, the fragility of memory, and the fate of women in turbulent times, unfolding against a backdrop of political upheaval.
Rather than illustrating the story, The Cat Garden Reading Club renders memory itself—fragmented, tender, spectral—inviting viewers into a shared affective space where history reverberates in color and motion.
