“I make art so that I can tolerate my own existence.”
Born Lanzhou City, Gansu Province, 1977
Yan Baishen’s father worked in a top-secret military factory on the Loess Plateau, in northwestern China. Sequestered from the rest of the nation, his family were untouched by the changes that swept through it in the 1980s and ’90s. Ketchup, part of a trilogy of animations based on the artist’s childhood, deftly conveys the way small events in memory become inseparably intertwined with larger ones.
