PB TAILS x Zhou Yichen | A metal game cartridge, an artist’s memory, and a living wall built by all of us.
The GRANDMA project is an emotional two-part work combining a Game Boy-style cartridge game and a ‘Grandma Wall’ pixel display, created from artist Zhou Yichen’s story of caring for his grandmother and designed to turn a loved one into a pixel portrait that never fades. The project grew from a personal circumstance: when the artist’s grandmother fell at home and he became her caregiver, he began recording their days together as a game — bringing her meals, eating together, walking, buying the soda she liked — the small repeated rituals of care documented in the pixel-art language of the Game Boy he grew up playing. The cartridge holds this narrative game, an emotional record of caregiving expressed through retro game design. The Grandma Wall is the companion object: a physical pixel display that renders a person’s likeness as enduring pixel art, turning a photograph of a loved one into a pixel portrait that persists — the ‘pixel that never fades’ of the title. PB Tails, the game company behind the project, positions GRANDMA as a work about memory, love, and the preservation of a person through the nostalgic, enduring medium of pixel art, targeting those who value emotional storytelling and the preservation of personal memory.
