Having grown up in China, I explore the feeling of being unfree. This feeling comes from my experience of being scrutinized and held to a party standard in which education and manipulation go hand-in-hand.

I draw inspiration from the feeling of being confined, for instance, by family break-downs; being used as leverage in familial disputes; the insurmountable barriers of my parents, who live in a China Dream. I'm held hostage by the feelings I experience while witnessing China's acceleration; by the way my school teachers wielded authority to ostracize students; and by the omnipresent fear that gets passed down through generations.

Since 2016, I’ve sought non-metaphorical ways to address these topics. I've found that metaphor tends to turn a lived experience into fungible concepts, uprooted from reality. I seek to once again dive into that reality and regain some agency in it. Inspired by Do Ho Suh, I recreate environments, from memory as well as through research, to understand the inner workings behind the surface of everydayness.

I learned my first lesson about architecture during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Back then, many cities, regardless of their location, were pushing for rapid real estate development amid the market boom. The rise of sleek buildings with “international appeal” coincided with the displacement of rural households and the migrant workers who built everything. In late ’aughties China, the first step of an architectural master plan was demolition. Today, this unmentioned cost of architecture resonates deeply with me when I read Irene Cheng on the racialism embedded in architecture, as well as Arata Isozaki on the search for a national style during Imperial Japan’s colonial expansion. Where the hidden cost of a designed development is concerned, nothing is metaphorical. Material history and individuals’ lived reality are inseparable.

More recently, in September 2021, I went to see Wong Ping’s solo show at the New Museum in New York City. Many visitors that day were there to see Wong Ping’s work. I was bowled over to find that most of them were Cantonese-speaking “aunties” — that is, Chinese women of my parents’ generation or older. They were lounging on beanbags and benches while taking in Wong’s highly sexualized, controversial video works that touched on themes such as obsessive masturbation and BDSM. Hearing snippets of their conversation and laughter, I realized that these attendees were enjoying both the work and each other’s company immensely. In all my years of practicing studio art, never before had I seen this type of audience among contemporary exhibition-goers. More broadly, I had never been privy to the marvelous spectacle of Cantonese-language animation featured in a major museum show. In one dark, multi-channel screening room, some of the aunties and I shared a cylindrical velvet bench, communally enjoying vibrant, fearless animations that addressed social injustice, sexual fetishes, and irreversible childhood imprints. Since that day, I’ve come to understand that I, too, must make works like this—fun-filled works that address subjects both serious and taboo, accessible to a diversity of ever-growing new audiences.