Did You See Me? originates from my recurring dreams and childhood memories of my grandmother’s house in central China — a place filled with lace curtains, patterned tiles, fluorescent clocks, and tropical wallpapers. These details, once comforting, now appear uncanny in recollection. When I returned years later to photograph the space, I tried to capture the strange tension between intimacy and estrangement. I realised that memory does not preserve; it mutates. Every familiar corner seemed slightly distorted, as if reconstructed from a dream rather than recalled from life.

​​

​

​

​

My dreams carry the same instability: houses with endless floors, dead infants sealed in glass, family members transforming into masked figures, and rooms that seem alive. These fragmented visions form the emotional and visual foundation of the work, teaching me that fear is not necessarily about violence or shock — it can emerge quietly from confusion, uncertainty, and dislocation.

​

​

​

​

Reading Ossian Brown’s Haunted Air and Bruce Kawin’s Horror and the Horror Film profoundly shaped my understanding of horror.

​​​​​​

Haunted Air collects anonymous photographs from early 20th-century Halloween rituals — people in handmade masks, their faces stiff and expressionless, caught between play and ceremony. It suggested that horror can arise from slight distortions of the familiar, and that photography itself is a haunted medium: one that preserves life while freezing death.

​​​​​​

Kawin’s writing revealed how horror has evolved from external monsters to internal psychological landscapes — where the haunted house becomes a state of mind.

​​

​

​

​

Visually, I was influenced by Nobuhiko Obayashi’s cult film House (1977) and David Lynch’s domestic surrealism, both of which treat home as a site of absurdity, humour, and unease. Their mixture of sweetness and menace resonates with my own dream imagery. The exaggerated colours and collage-like rhythm of House informed the visual logic of my AI-generated sequences.

​​

​

​

​

Ultimately, Did You See Me? translates these layered influences into a physical environment. The installation consists of a small room made of semi-transparent fabric, resin sculptures scattered across the floor, and multiple AI-generated projections. Viewers walk through the space as if entering a dream — drifting between recognition and misrecognition, tenderness and fear, between the image that watches and the one being watched.