There are always monuments and graveyards of the unknown soldiers appearing in my travels in Southeast Asia. It seems that there is nothing more expressive of modern nationalist culture than they are. These morphologically abstract memorials were given an open, ceremonial tribute, but no one at all knew exactly which characters are actually burried under them. Perhaps, they were intentional imaginations.

On a plane to Thailand, I experienced another poetic Southeast Asian imagination. It is an airline magazine title that promotes tourist attractions in Southeast Asia: “Apart from snow, there is everything” I was almost puzzled by this sentence and caught in a confused guess. If there is snow in Southeast Asia, isn't it a human Eden?

Unfortunately, Southeast Asia cannot have snow. Snow is a night vision beyond the hot reality. It is like a monument standing at a crossroads that is noisy, and that can only belong to human’s imagination.

I am curious about the combination of two different kinds of imaginations, so I used image post-processing means to make collages of artificial snow made from refrigerators and everyday objects on the surfaces of different monumental photographs in an attempt to simulate an imaginary snow scene. The layer of snow and the hidden details of its everyday objects have changed the monument's always abstract, symmetric and inviolable posture, bringing with it some natural features and secularisation. This change also brought the monument closer to the real environment around it, and the ice seal under the red sun has continuously hinted at the flaws of this “magic show”. The monument has also been given a new kind of meaninglessness.

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