Looking up, I find the moon bright 举头望明月
While browsing Google Maps, I happened
to click on the moon and discovered a lunar
crater called McDonald. At first I found it
very interesting that the word "McDonald"
appeared on the moon, and I couldn't help
but remember eating at the McDonald's,
and began to miss the McDonald's I used
to eat as a child, And then a question arose:
Since when did a fast food brand from the
West become a deserved connection to my
childhood and my hometown for me---the
young generation growing up in the East?
This project can be seen as an inquiry and a
practice into this mechanism.
I found that this phenomenon is not only happening to me, but when talking to millennials around me. McDonald's standardized production process produces products with a high degree of consistency in appearance, which becomes the best trigger to call on our distant memories. Someone even exclaimed on the social media that life is all about eating McDonald's in different cities, with 1.8w likes, and this statement affirms the accuracy of McDonald in calling on memories of hometown and childhood: the city I live in is changing, the face of my hometown is changing, but McDonald and it's burgers always looks the same as my memory. During the research, my attempt to find a childhood photo of myself with Ronald McDonald, has failed, and my mother claims that such a photo exists, but again, the search was still in vain. Do I have this photo or not? Or was it just a mistake in my memory as well as my mother's: the popularity of the photo with Ronald McDonald in my country gave us the illusion that I also had such a photo. This also highlights the great influence of McDonald on my generation, a collective memory of McDonald's shaping my individual memory. So I collected such photos from the Internet，and used mirror to reflect the viewers as a part of my practice.
Finally, I turned the bun burger that my mother would make for me when I was a kid into a puree, which was consistent with my childhood memory, and re-pressed it into a patty as a base, and replaced the patty of the burger in the McDonald's Happy Meal with it, ensuring a consistent appearance while giving meaning to the core of the "burger" generated by my personal memory. Then I recorded it with a large-format camera, using Scheimpflug principle and a small aperture to ensure that both burgers are completely clear and the appearance is unobstructed. The production process is shown to inform the viewer of the practice and the process of meaning making. The moon is a trigger of nostalgia in Chinese culture since ancient times.but when I view it through modern technology, the nostalgia represented by the moon overlaps with the McDonald's, which is a universal experience of nostalgia unprecedented in my generation.
"Thoughts on a Tranquil Night
Before my bed a pool of light—
O can it be hoar-frost on the ground?
Looking up, I find the moon bright;
Bowing, in homesickness I’m drowned."
An ancient Chinese poem, by Li Bai
Translated by Xu Yuanchong
