Gallery 3

You Wouldn’t Remember Him (2026)

Richard Trang

The photograph is a powerful and important medium. Its evidential force proves what the eye cannot see and recalls what the mind has forgotten. Its role in the family cannot be overlooked, functioning to preserve histories, identify family members, and map lineages.

At birth we are welcomed into the world at the click of a shutter; already an image, as if our physical self were insufficient evidence of being. Prior to birth, we are imaged on several occasions with Ultrasound and subjected to a range of observations and tests. And finally, at death, we live on in the digital and physical photographs that we are a part of.

You wouldn't remember him (2026) considers the family album and its role in portraying a nuclear family. A seldom-opened object, it harbours traumas and fictions under the guise of an Australian household narrative. And though never physically present (nor its contents), it permeates its logic as the first architecture the artist ever occupied - not a house, a home, but an archive. Drawing on found images, the work replicates the sense of unfamiliarity he feels when opening his personal family album.

The work is activated in the same way one might encounter unfamiliar images in their own family album. Viewers are active participants, being encouraged to engage the installation, sit on the couch and cast themselves upon the work.