My ceramic work is modeled after tokens of remembrance—ritual objects, funerary monuments, and fossilized creatures—which are infested, deconstructed, and rebuilt by hand. As one of the oldest and most universal materials associated with productive as well as artistic labor, clay naturally lends itself to the fundamental reconsideration of human activities at large. Reconfiguring fragmented personal and collective memories, I create collections of symbolic artifacts and zoomorphic ruins as the materialization of the archaic and the invisible, taking inspiration from colonial architecture and tenement houses in Macau that have been demolished or gentrified beyond recognition. In the process, I reenact the non-linearity and materiality of the past, molding a tactile connection to the disappearing, impossible identity of home: Taoist mythology, folk superstitions, and colonial history provide essential source material for my exploration of transcendental displacement and nostalgia as the condition of contemporary and future existence.
For the past few years, I have been engaged with the zoomorphic imaginings of Shanhaijing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), a text compiling hundreds of geographies and fantastical creatures dated as early as the 4th century BCE. The source narratives of these cross-pollinated species, transmutable beings, and androgynous beasts inform my sculptural conceptions of a mythical space, interweaving anti-colonial, anti-categorical, non-linear thinking with personal histories as an origin of seeded resilience.
