STATEMENT OF WORK

Working in the studio feels like navigating a labyrinth. Materials come to me through intuition and chance encounters. They find me because they share something inherent with me, yet as they pass through me—like water flowing through a tunnel and becoming something new—their differences are magnified by the resonance of the familiar. This transformation creates an emulsified reality, where boundaries blur and forms shift.

Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and (s)he’s not the same man.” Yet every morning, when I step into the studio, cut plywood into shapes, or mold toilet paper into irregular forms, I feel as if I am stepping into the same river again and again. The river remains because there is no shore. I am part of its current, drifting and morphing with time. In my studio, there is no fixed point of anchorage—only flowing water that rises and falls with the passage of time. In this continuous drift, I sift through fragments of my life: memories stretching from my adolescence in Beijing to my adulthood in the U.S., emotions that resist reconciliation, fears both rational and intuitive, and relationships with my mother, grandparents, and those who inhabit my past and present. My studio is where time converges, where I step into the same river endlessly, though its depths can never be fully grasped. I am a river.

My practice resists singularity, refusing to rely on any fixed form or material. Instead, it takes the shape of a rhizomatic bricolage, where elements shift and reconfigure, shaping the work in collaboration with the materials themselves. As a Chinese person living in the U.S., I remain keenly aware of the gap—reducible yet unavoidable—between myself and the culture that surrounds me. In response, I let the materials speak, articulating both the digested past and the partially understood present.

My work merges the emotional immediacy of gestural mark-making with the grounded stability of materials. By entwining these elements, I access both the layered density of the psyche and the physicality of the female body—an integrated vessel that holds fragmented thoughts and emotions together. On a personal level, my practice acts as a mediator between mind and body, allowing subconscious thoughts to surface as tangible experience. I hope my work facilitates a similar process for viewers, using precarity as an entry point into a physical encounter that invites them to reexamine those familiar yet elusive sensations.