The 90s was the age of television. At that time, watching TV every day was my happiest time. The most impressive thing is ,that you can always see “Journey to the West” on a certain channel  every winter and summer holidays on TV. Maybe many people, like me, first got to know “Journey to the West”, one of the  Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, not because of reading the novel, but because of this TV drama. In the opening song of the show, Monkey King’s auto-tuned bounce and the peculiar synthesizer soundtrack have become a cultural symbol, deeply imprinted in the memory of our generation, I think. After 2000, with the gradual popularization of personal computers and the Internet, today with the explosion of image information, it is difficult for us to find such distinctive, collective memory cultural symbols. But about such collective memory, sometimes it is also an illusion.

I remember that in an aesthetics class in the university, the professor asked us to recall a very famous contemporary news event. This event was accompanied by a news picture that appeared on major news pages around the world. Everyone knew about this event. The professor asked us to describe the composition relationship of the characters/scene in this news picture in our memory. He then read out everyone's descriptions, compared the original pictures. It was surprised to find that no one's description was exact. 

I cut out the jumping clip of Monkey King in the beginning of the Journey to the West TV series, and then layered them on top of each other. The soundtrack was gradually overloaded and gradually recovered, and so on. Image memory is often blurred relative to objective facts, but the memory itself may be as strong as the sound of overload.

九十年代是电视的时代，那时候每天看电视是我最开心的时候。印象最为深刻的就是电视上一直放的西游记，每年寒暑假总能在某个台看到西游记。可能很多人和我一样，最先接触到西游记不是因为小说，而是因为电视剧。片头曲中孙悟空鬼畜般的弹跳，和奇特的合成器配乐变成了一个文化符号，深深印刻在我们这一代人的记忆里。2000年以后随着个人计算机和互联网的逐渐普及，在图像信息爆炸的今天，我们很难再找到这样鲜明的，集体记忆式的文化符号。但是关于这样的集体记忆，有时候也是一种错觉。

我记得大学里在一堂美学课上，教授让我们回忆一起当代很有名的新闻事件，这个事件当时伴随着一张新闻图片出现在过全世界各大新闻版面上，大家都对这个事件了然于心。教授让我们描述记忆中这张新闻图片人物/场景的构图关系，然后把大家的描述纷纷读出来，再对比原图，惊讶地发现竟然没有一个人的描述是完全吻合的。

我把西游记电视剧片头里孙悟空的弹跳片段剪了出来，然后一层层叠加，音轨也逐渐过载，又逐渐恢复，如此循环往复。图像记忆相对于客观事实往往会模糊，但记忆本身可能会像过载的声音一样持续强烈。