Lost memories (Under the Gaze)
Recycled fabric, pencil, mixed media on layered textile, 37 x 37 cm, 2024
 
Artwork Statement
This body of work explores memory erosion and repetition through the lens of Alzheimer’s disease, inspired by my grandfather’s gradual cognitive decline. The work reflects my ongoing interest in how illness reshapes identity, memory, and the notion of self.
Before beginning postgraduate study, my paintings were highly planned and controlled. Under my supervisor’s encouragement to “learn to make mistakes,” I began to embrace spontaneity, allowing process to replace precision. The use of recycled fabric emerged from observing my grandfather’s hoarding behaviour, a symptom often associated with dementia. Objects he kept — aluminium cans, boxes, and white shirts — became both material and emotional reference points within the work.
By smearing pencil onto torn fabric, I recreated the dark CT shadows of dementia patients’ brains, images that suggest both trauma and release. Returning to black and white echoes my grandfather’s lifelong devotion to calligraphy, as well as my own sense of mourning. Inspired in part by Lucio Fontana’s ruptured canvases, I use folds, punctures, and layered textile surfaces to reflect on the irreversible fading of memory. Within Distributed Worlds, the work considers how selfhood becomes dispersed through illness, and how fragile material forms can hold traces of both loss and care.
 
Artist Bio
Xinyu Yao is a visual artist based in Melbourne, Australia. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese Painting from Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts and is currently completing a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University. Grounded in calligraphy and ink traditions, his practice examines the continuing influence of Confucian values on identity, morality, and psychological autonomy in contemporary East Asian societies. Through experimental distortion, ink-based processes, and hybrid figuration, his work explores social surveillance, anxiety, alienation, and the fragile boundaries between memory and selfhood.