Your Favourite Disappointment | 真的是白疼你了

Your Favourite Disappointment is a dialectical reflection that traces a tender struggle between being authentic to self and fulfilling familial obligations through past conversations and memories.

My father had one lifelong dream for all his three children: that we secure a stable and well-paying job for us to lead a comfortable life. He would drill it into us whenever an opportunity presented itself. Coming from a poor family, my father never wanted us to experience what he had been through. 

Up till the earlier years of my adulthood, I went along with his dream and followed a socially acceptable progression of career-building in the financial sector. By a twist of fate, I decided to pursue a different form of a dream afterwards; I packed and moved to Paris, immersing myself in photography for an entire year.

For the first time, I felt my most authentic self, and I began documenting those fleeting moments on a Polaroid. It was also then that I had decided to leave the financial sector and engage myself fully in photography.

Since my return from Paris, my relationship with my dad had gradually gone distant. Recognising that I had failed to meet his expectations and feeling unseen for the path I had chosen to take, it often made me long to return to the place where I felt that I could be my most authentic self. 

Everything upended when my dad suffered 2 strokes within a year. It weighed on me that he needed me to be physically present to care for him and I should stay put. This obligation gradually shifted as I witnessed his determination to recover through treatment and physiotherapy. I began to document his recovery journey from a caregiver’s perspective.

Your Favourite Disappointment | 真的是白疼你了 stemmed out of these experiences, exploring the tension between expectations from others and selfhood, and the question if what we truly want is actually within our reach. 

As he regained strength, I began staging childhood memories with him using a Polaroid camera—an attempt to explore the paradox of crafting controlled images through a medium defined by unpredictability. 

While retracing our bond through text messages exchanged during my time in Paris, I uncovered how love and expectation often coexist uneasily within the fabric of a family. The correspondence was presented in a sales receipt form, portraying a feeling of a transactional relationship between two parties.  

Through the process of merging the images from my time in Paris, my interactions with my father over text, his recovery journey and the present-day staged photographs with him, I have come to reconcile with the struggles I’ve felt since the time I came back from Paris. It also became a reminder that, much like life itself, control and surrender are always intertwined.