Mao Yu and Shi Kaiqing from the School of Communication & Design presented their artwork “Past Memory” at the graduation exhibition. This piece provoked deep reflections on the value of old objects and won the gold award.

People often say that “newspapers are dead” because their market share and influence have been steadily declining. However, have newspapers really disappeared entirely? In fact, they haven’t. In a certain sense, newspapers still play a role in our social lives. As a classic medium, newspapers once played a crucial role in our daily lives. Over hundreds of years, newspapers have evolved beyond mere information dissemination tools to become integral parts of our memories, holding irreplaceable emotional value and potential for regeneration.

This graduation project uses newspapers as a medium to explore their various uses, application scenarios, and emotional connections with people. Mao Yu and Shi Kaiqing aim to create a memory space centered around newspapers. On one hand, they re-examine and understand people’s emotional connections to specific events, scenes, or objects, seeking to find the link between newspapers and daily life. On the other hand, through the reenactment of memories, they replay the transmission of emotional imagery among individuals and groups, evoking a sense of shared nostalgia in the audience. As the lead readers of past newspapers, the two graduates invite viewers to redefine newspapers in this experiment, explore the emotional resonance newspapers bring, and respond to today’s life through reshaped memories of the past while imagining the possibilities of the future.

Past Memory

Artist: Mao Yu, Shi Kaiqing (School of Communication & Design)

Instructor: Zheng Chao, Yao Zhijie