STATEMENT OF WORK

My mixed-media projects often start with my cross-generational, multi-species, diasporically-identified family. The contextualization of the personal within the historical and discursive is a way to advocate for a kind of meaning-making that is driven by both theory and affect. I am interested in dichotomous divides — between the personal and the political, the emotive and the logical, nature and culture, history and fiction. These are also the spaces in which the tongue-in-cheek can also be utterly sincere. 

I work in a range of media: painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. The choice of medium is often decided by a “what if” question. In the project An Archaeology of You, I ask, “what if ‘you’ is an unknown, existing only in the past and can only be understood in fragments and hypothesis, what can I learn about me?” The project belongs to an ongoing interest in the history of Taiwan, where I grew up, and where a long period of martial law silenced a whole generation, so much so that I was ignorant of the violence and oppression under a military dictatorship until I was well into adulthood.

In my current body of work, one of the “what if” questions I ask is, “what if I thought about my personal grief in relation to the grief of species extinction.” This body of work was prompted by the loss of my pet dog, which I recognize as an entirely sentimal and even silly premise, even more so in the state of our ecological crises. This, however, is the space between affect and theory that I find so rewarding, as it allows me to asks questions about non-human agencies, the relationship between domestication and extinction, and the violence of care.