zhixin sheng

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Utopian being I













Utopian Being I
2023
cyanotype, water, acrylic boxes 
19cm x 28.5cm
part of 2025 'Magic Hour' Exhibition at Yale-NUS College




Utopian Being I explores the fragile intersection of memory, materiality, and longing. Working with cyanotype prints sourced from a discarded family photo archive housed in a dusty shoebox tucked under the bedframe, the artist navigates the tension between familiarity and foreignness, encountering her family’s past as both intimate and imagined.


The cyanotype process becomes a metaphor for this mediated connection—its development in water mirroring the artist’s desire to clarify the past through imagination. Yet, cyanotype resists permanence; as the pigment dissolves, the image emerges only to blur and fade, embodying the transient nature of nostalgia. By submerging a cyanotype of her young mother—whom she never met but longs to know—the artist captures the poignancy of lost time and the impossibility of fully grasping what is no longer there.