Last CD

If you ever had a CD that you played repeatedly on your portable player, if you remember rows of transparent plastic cases and shiny silver discs in record stores, or if you ever listened to an album repeatedly late at night until you fell asleep – this book might rekindle a period of time that had been put away.

Continuing his recent excavation of "old media," Li Han-Chiang moves from DVDs to CDs. Through labor-intensive, deliberately skewed hand-drawn reproductions, he re-salvages objects that once carried future imaginations, launching a creative act nestled between personal memory and media archaeology.

From Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" to Mariah Carey's Christmas melodies; from 90s domestic and international pop music albums, record covers, to the culture of burning CDs, these material memories, once so commonplace and later gradually replaced by streaming, are re-invoked in Li Han-Chiang's work, transforming into a ghost-like existence within collective memory.

Li Han-Chiang's creations exist between imitation, adaptation, and aestheticized piracy. He reproduces them with a method akin to "to draw is to burn," transforming the mechanical process originally belonging to reproduction technology into a highly physical labor process. The repeated act of drawing, time and again, is not merely a reproduction of images, but also a re-engraving of media residue.

In Japanese, "last" (最後) not only refers to the literal end but also implies "saving the best for last."

The gleaming laser etching once promised a future. Now, in the post-internet era, that outdated sense of futurism returns in the form of nostalgia. What Li Han-Chiang salvages is not only the physical objects and ghosts left by CD culture but also a feeling of having once believed that the future would arrive in such a way.

Those sounds and images that haven't truly disappeared are waiting to be played again.