Terrain in Vain

Solo Exhibition at Gallery Route One (Point Reyes, CA), September 14 - October 20, 2024

I create photo-based sculptures made of photographs I have taken in places I have lived and visited. As an Asian-American human, I identify as being of the diaspora and a product of assimilation culture. I believe what we see around us—the landscape and buildings, the types of labor and activities, the aesthetic and technological choices and conditions—plays a role in who we are while our lineages inform how we make sense of it all. I have lived my life walking and weaving within urban spaces of the US while psychologically contending with generational traumas, motherlands (China and Japan) as simultaneously foreign and integrated, and my own position within histories of speculation, hierarchical race creation and colonialism. By photographing and sewing together places from all over the world that I have occupied or inhabited, I create sculptures honoring the manifestations of histories, shared needs, connected conditions. The resulting sculptures are psychogeographic maps that miniaturize and deconstruct structured space—a product of human labor, the authority of financialization, and modern survival.

A central theme of my work is the toxic—and ultimately futile—desire for control, and its resulting hierarchical structures borne from human fear and trauma. The amalgamation of twisted and contorted images of human-built interventions displayed on delicate, biodegradable material speaks both to the fragility of our physical world and to the swirl of emotions and ideas entangled in our complex society. The placements of these objects, in both real and distorted manners into public and infrastructural landscapes, ask the viewer to consider the details of their surroundings, the inequitable structures that provide our everyday lives, and that our attempts to control each other and our environments are at the core of the crisis.