Living Fantasies

by Weilong Fang

As a child, my thoughts are a constant stream of stories and hashing out their details is a favorite pastime of mine. But there is only so much your imagination can do. The stories, or rather, the characters, only exist in the mind. They are fragile against the ever flowing stream of time. A silly childhood fear of mine is that one day, I would forget those wonderful stories. I was afraid that the moment I stop thinking about them they might be forgotten. So, I doodled everywhere. Mostly on my bedroom wall, to the frustration of my parents, but occasionally on paper too. I find it easier to recall the story, particularly the details, when there is a visual representation of them. I was looking at some old photographs of my doodles when it struck me that I could hardly recognize any of these doodles, much less remember their stories. This series is a recreation of my past doodles, particularly the ones whose story I have forgotten. It is both a brief revisit of my childhood and a reflection of my internal self. The doodles are cut out and placed among everyday items like the doodles are interacting with their environment. That, somehow, made them more believable. The photographs are proofs of their existence, anchors of forgotten dreams to reality.