"Exploring family archives, self-portraits, and still life photography, William Zou’s series “soliloquy” interweaves and oscillates between personal past and present."
Artist: William Zou
Project: Soliloquy
One of our jury's favorite project, from the October 2023 opencall.
By remapping queerness, diaspora, and family within new spatial-temporal relationships, he aims to unveil identity as a fragmented experience that continually transforms. In particular, the series sheds light on identities desired, disrupted, and dismissed to consider the dilemmas of belonging and becoming.
Inspired by a range of film auteurs from Yasujiro Ozu, Ang Lee, and Edward Yang, to more recent filmmakers like Maggie Lee, the book tries to address the so-called “Confucian Confusion” and untangle why many try so relentlessly to fit into the paradigm and looking to become the perfect archetype of “good family” within East Asian culture.
Resultingly, “soliloquy” chose to employ a circuitous syntax that repeatedly poses and proposes unseen relationships between photographs taken at different times and of different subjects. Carefully chosen and displayed by the artist, the series not only questions what would happen if we stopped thinking of ourselves in terms of identity categories but also envisions alternative narratives that can otherwise come into existence.
© William Zou