Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about your background as an artist?
I’m the daughter of Thai and Indonesian immigrants, specifically Indochinese on my mom’s side. I feel like a lot of my identity infuses my work in really profound ways. My artistic practice spans sculpture, textiles, public art, and ritual. Very transdisciplinary as you can see. But I think about my work as creating portals for renewal and repair. I am often harnessing grief and loss, transmuting those experiences into liminal spaces that allow people to lay down burdens and find paths to connection, transformation, and repair.
How did your journey as an artist begin?
I think perhaps I have a more circuitous journey. I actually started in neuroscience, of all places. At the time, I was studying the brain and asking the question, how do we age gracefully? We looked at everything from what you eat, how much you exercise, what is your socioeconomic status, your education, all of that. And what we found, actually it’s our social ties that determine how we age – the strength of our social ties. After that particular insight, I was like, you know what? I’m not meant to be a scientist. I want to cultivate spheres of care in my work. That is how I want to impact the world. And that is now what I do as an artist.
How does your studio practice relate to your public art projects?
I’m exploring the same themes—the connection between the personal, the cultural, and the systemic—but they manifest in different ways. I think of these approaches as part of a larger ecosystem. Recently, my studio practice has become more introspective, delving into the nuanced, specific, and deeply personal ways that colonialism and imperialism affect us. These impacts often have profound bodily and psychic dimensions, and my work seeks to navigate the relationship between personal experiences and broader power structures.
With public art, I am doing it on a collective scale. It always involves participation from the community and audience, whether that’s through engaging with the work once it’s installed or through months of research and collaboration with community members. Living and working with them to make and create work that draws directly from their legacies, histories, and lived experiences. Community and audience involvement can occur at any stage of the process.
What themes are you exploring in your current body of work?
One of the pieces I have been working on, titled What Power Sits in the Telling, interrogates who and what gets to be represented. It juxtaposes objects like a clay vase from historical sites in Northern and Northeastern Thailand with familiar, everyday items such as tins. So much of my work is trying to place importance on these quiet moments that sustain our lives using materials that folks would be familiar with in their homes. And using these materials as vessels that carry meaning through storytelling.
For instance, the Shell can I am using for this work. We know broadly about Shell’s human rights abuses. But when you search about it, you can’t find anything in English and you can only find it very sparingly in Thai. So then we’re talking about these larger systems of power, how capitalism and imperialism impact and shape our daily lives.
How do you think about the materials in your studio and their role in your practice?
Many of these materials are either scraps from works that have left the studio or materials waiting to be used. It’s just a small part of my collection. I think it’s organized chaos in a way, and that reflects how my practice manifests. I need to see the materials and understand how they live in concert with each other—to see how they might tell a story or express a particular emotion or moment. Much of this is sourced from different places. For example, these textiles are from Thailand, and some materials are from Materials for the Arts. There are old photographs from the 1950s that I picked up from an uncle at a night market. What’s interesting about having these materials visually present in the space is that their sourcing journeys are always with you in the studio.
Every time I look at these beads that were blessed by a monk, I see the monk’s face. Another material makes me think of Eleanor and Jonah Ting and the shifts in the community in Chinatown, caused by gentrification, erasure, and marginalization. Sometimes, our beloved institutions and communities are no longer there in brick and mortar, but they live on in our hearts. I can smell the soy sauce I used to marinate these chopsticks for dyeing. I think about all the labor—the sweat, heat, grease, and love—that restaurant owners pour into their work. It also makes me think about my dad, who I would wait up for at 3 a.m. when he came home after working his way up from being a busboy to owning his restaurants.
Objects are vessels for internal exploration, especially when placed together in ways that create tension, precariousness, and something to respond to.
The way you’re describing or looking at the materials in this room shows that you have so much of the community with you.
Absolutely. I think that’s such an interesting way to think about the materials in the studio. People often associate studio practice with solitude, but the way these materials are connected brings so much of the community into this space, even if I’m physically alone. It’s comforting to feel supported by the presence of these stories and communities.
At the same time, it’s a reminder of my responsibility to express, with care, all that these people have so generously shared with me.
