Through scenes arranged to evoke nostalgia and melancholy, Chen’s Temptations series explores romance and the historical inequality of women in society. In Memories, beautiful women, dressed as schoolgirls, are placed in an unlikely landscape. The artist, a former architect, draws on China’s past in his photographic myth-making, whether by adopting philosophical ideas of time and space; following aesthetic principles such as layered planes of imagery; or relating landscape photography to Chinese landscape painting. Chen seeks to “express the unhappy present and the happy past” through the mood of “vague calm” that pervades this photograph.