STATEMENT OF WORK

I create soft sculpture, interactive 3D spaces, and confessional zines that cry out to be seen, touched, held, comforted. Through labor-intensive stitching of physical and digital forms, I drench my work in melancholic cuteness. I bring ugly feelings to the surface of endearing, approachable fictional characters and worlds. 

I’m captivated by the off-kilter humor and origin stories of “avatars” such as Hello Kitty, Aggretsuko, Wechat sticker bunnies, and what they reveal about their creators and consumers. We consume endearing—but inherently unfeeling—avatars to imbue them with our affects like disgust, fear and distress. Similarly to how Sanrio’s Aggretsuko suppresses her rage at having to work overtime as an office worker, then screams heavy metal at karaoke bars, my sculptures contain ominous narratives of product oversaturation behind soft, approachable exteriors. I produce artwork that demands to be cherished and protected, using the “feminine” proprietary desire for cuteness to challenge the logics of corporate-driven technological advancement and endless capital accumulation. As our own personas shift fluidly between online and offline, our avatars must too. With my avatar sculptures, I explore the intersection between sewing pattern construction and digital UV mapping. I weave together video, sculpture, and performance into dream-like montages to investigate themes of affect, technology, and East Asian diasporic identity.

Born and raised in a working class Chinese-American immigrant family in Brooklyn, I deconstruct the commercial iconography of my neighborhood. With parents busy overworking to make ends meet, I was instead raised by 99 cent stores, home-shopping TV, and Sanrio boutiques. The rhetoric and visual vocabulary of these settings (free! sale! this could be yours!) continue to influence my work, invoking our simultaneous attraction and repulsion to product oversaturation. I use scraps of old dresses, towels, and toys that carry tangible histories from their original owners. For me, turning discarded material into “cute objects” is to transform them to a state of digital and physical permanence, where you or I can’t bear to let them go. I produce slowly and methodically, injecting emotion into discarded goods.