a letter to my loves

[This was an assignment for a class. As the final assignment, we were given the prompt of writing a letter or a love diary. I had decided to somewhat combine the two prompts within the given time limit of 3 minutes]


artist statement:
What do you remember about your first love? Not the person, but the feeling of what love meant to you then? Sometimes, it’s the obsessive and clingy nature of love; that makes you happy and declaration of such a love that makes you proud.

In the video, I talk about my past love experiences with the year noted of when I had started to love them. Then, as we grow, we realise that people are not as easy to love. As much as love can radiate happiness, and give you strength, it can be just as draining because it means giving back just as much.

I wanted to create this video as a short diary with the idea of it being a dive into a diary; a handful of short letters and even a journey of my past loves. In the first half of my/our lives, we associate a lot of fondness to inanimate objects. I wanted to honor non-romantic love in the first few because my love for those things have greatly shaped me. They’ve left their marks on me and it felt important to tell the stories I have related to them.

In the second half, the video slowly sinks into my adolescent search for romantic love. It went from looking for it in a superficial way to actually realising what it is to //like// someone;;

Again, the use of brown-scrapbook paper is to create a diary feel; and for me, i often keep journals of events and wanted to show that visually without having to actually show my real diary entries. Although, at the start of the video, a small diary, which was my actual first diary is shown, that i started keeping in 2005-2007.

Of course, this is personal to me but I think that the ideas of love transforming is relatable to everyone here. It’s not exactly the same as my journey but the sentiments of thinking about love changes for us all as we grow older.