Zeyu (Alees) Yang

The Presence of Forgetting: Jewelry as a Bodily Experience of Time and Fading Memory

The Presence of Forgeting: Jewelry as a Bodily Experience of Time and Fading Memory explores how memory continues to exist through the body as it fades from conscious recall. Through fragile fabrics, printed photographic fragments, pearls, and loose threads, I create jewelry that changes through making, wearing, touch, and movement. Rather than treating memory as something fixed or fully recoverable, this project understands it as partial, unstable, and continually reconstructed in the present.

Beginning with personal memories of family, love, and loss, the work considers forgetting not simply as disappearance, but as a condition through which emotional and sensory traces remain. By using absence, incompleteness, and material dissolution, the pieces invite the wearer and viewer to experience memory as something that continues to shape us. In this project, forgetting becomes a form of release: not an erasure of the past, but a way of returning to the present.

Forming as It Fades Material
Chiffon, thread, uv printed images on fabric

During the making and wearing process, impermanence appears through the work itself. With each stitch, threads begin to loosen, detach, and fall onto the body and clothing. 

Once, a Summer Reunion
2025
chiffon, uv printed images on fabric, nickel silver
 

I chose chiffon as my material. Its softness and fluidity draw from a childhood memory of mine: a quiet afternoon, the aroma of dumplings, a curtain lifting in the wind. This scene brings me back to a sense of ease and stillness I long for to this day.

The Pearl Necklace
chiffon, uv printed images on fabric

I cut out still frames from a video of my mother placing a pearl necklace around my neck. When the necklace hangs in space, it becomes translucent and indistinct; when attached to the body, it regains clarity. The image is activated through the body. 

Skin to skin
chiffon, threads, fresh water pearls, uv printed images on fabric

I string together small fragments of fabric piece by piece into a bracelet. The work remains very soft, so that each time the hand passes through it, there is a sensation of being wrapped; reminiscent of the sense of security I felt as a child holding a small blanket. Each time it is worn, the threads loosen and fall away. 

Lighting fireworks with dad
jade beads, uv printed image, threads, sliver pin, chiffon.

In this pocket jewelry piece, I translate this condition into material form by printing photographic images onto jade beads. As the body moves, the beads shift, and the image changes with them. When viewed up close, only blurred outlines remain; the details can never be fully confirmed. But this lack of clarity does not seem to affect the viewers’ perception. We still recognize it as a family photograph, assuming what it must convey: happiness, togetherness, positivity. 

Returning to the Present
chiffon, threads, fresh water pearls, sliver, uv print images on fabric

I use fabric to represent the blurred and disordered nature of memory. The mirror on the top acts as a prompt, bringing the wear back to an experience of now.

Hi, old friend! 
chiffon, fresh water pearls, sliver, bronze, uv print images on fabric

By unraveling and folding the image, I created a front and a back. I use these two sides to tell a story that once existed, but that I no longer remember. The front shows my face, while the back shows the face of my childhood friend. I still recognize both faces, but I no longer remember what happened between us. I can only reconstruct this memory through imagination.