"The Promising Afar" is a personal project-a series of illustrations that revisits the surreal optimism of early 2000s China through the lens of childhood memory, forgotten technology, and quiet melancholy. It reflects on generational memory, cultural shifts, and the promise that we were once walking together along an untrodden path.
The protagonist sits alone at the center of a classroom. The chairs and desks have been pushed aside, leaving her in a hollowed-out space where joy once gathered. Windows UI-like .png tabs floated in the air contains fragments of decorations: they hint at a celebration long gone-or one that never truly happened. She leans gently against one, aware that the celebration isn’t real, but unwilling to let go of the memory piece. Her solitude contrasts the imagined festivity, casting a solemn shadow over a space meant for laughter.
A quiet winter street unfolds beneath the remnants of a celebration long gone. The futuristic building, clad in blue glass and crowned with an almost UFO-like structure, once stood as a symbol of faith in technology and curiosity. Scattered across the snow are torn red papers-what remains of fireworks, once vital to New Year festivities but now fading due to shifting cultural norms. The puddle reflects not reality, but memory: a pixelated silhouette of the girl lingers in its surface, glitched and unstable, suggesting that this scene no longer exists-except in her recollection.
Rows of monitors glow softly in a sunlit computer lab-the kind many first encountered in childhood. The girl stands among the machines, her body rendered in a transparent checker pattern-an unfinished self, like a file still loading. Her face appears repeatedly on the screens, each bathed in that iconic blue-sky Windows wallpaper. These looping portraits reflect how digital spaces have shaped yet fragmented our identity. While the setting recalls the hopeful beginnings of a connected world, there’s an underlying tension: the dream that the internet would unite everyone and bring understanding has never arrived.
Amid iconic old furnishings-a sewing machine, metal bed, and bulky TV that once defined countless northern Chinese homes, the protagonist sits among relics of another era: CDs, tape recorder, scattered media that once carried voices, dreams, and distant broadcasts. A glowing, Frutiger Metro-styled effects gently rise from the disc she holds, yet her gaze stays fixed on the disc itself-searching, remembering. The surreal contrast between the mundane room and the ethereal forms evokes the feeling of memory reawakening: not just as nostalgia, but as a quiet act of rediscovery.
