shashasha

Influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s collection of polaroids and the works of Fernando Pessoa, Zhu Mo’s _Bright, Bright Day _is a compilation of various mosaic-like snapshots of friends, landscapes and family. The softly focused images of black and white beaches and color photographs create a world which is both visually poetic and inescapably fragile, presenting a narrative filled with the romanticisms of life and death, delicately held and viewed back in the forms of faded memories and intimate nostalgia.

“Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets - if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.

The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning…The crippled sleet of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain…The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner…What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too - I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other. “

-The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa