I first got to know you through the exhibition Means of Production here at this warehouse. Could you tell us about that project and how Lunch Hour came together?
My collaborators Lily Jue Sheng, Do Tuong Linh, and I had been having conversations for a long time about the division of wage labor and art practice, and what it means to be an artist in New York and abroad today. There was a lot of shared sentiment among our peers about how increasingly unsustainable it feels to maintain a practice while working here. I’d been thinking about putting together an exhibition connected to this building, my work, and my family’s hosiery business for a long time. It kind of just naturally came together. We didn’t mean for it to grow into something so big, but the space really allowed for it. It ended up being an 80-person exhibition, with screenings, performances, sculptures — really everything.
For that show, I exhibited a kinetic sculpture from a series of hourglass works encased in knit fishnet steel cable or hosiery. The one I showed sat on a base made from a Chinese seal script character, which is something that recurs in a lot of my sculptures. The hourglass was wrapped in hosiery with two sides that said “you” and “me.” It’s part of my ongoing research around language, translation, labor, and how my different identities — Taiwanese American, artist, fabricator — are tied to these exchanges of culture and labor. The sand moved really slowly between the two sides, passing from “you” to “me” and back again, just continuously.
Let’s talk about your recent solo exhibition, Sweetwater, at Island Gallery. Could you share the meaning behind the exhibition title?
The Sweetwater installation stemmed from research I was doing about Taiwan, specifically the region near Tainan in the south, where my parents are from. There’s a long history of sugarcane farming and production there, with many cycles throughout the region’s history. The legacy of that commodity is still very much infused into the culture today.
You can feel these connections to the past, where there’s both a dark history of colonialism, exploitation, and capitalism tied to sugarcane, but also a sense of pride in the economic strength it brought to the region. It’s said that the cuisine is sweeter there because of it. There was even a saying back in the day that “even the water is sweet” in Tainan, just because sugar had become such a part of everyday life, the culture, and the regional identity.
The drawing in the exhibition really stood out. It felt distinct from the rest of the work. Could you tell us about it?
The drawing is really special to me. My dad made it, and it’s based on one of his childhood memories. About 15 years ago, when I was studying photography in school, I did this project where I sat down with him to trace and retrace his steps. He had grown up with very little, in a farming region in Taiwan, and there weren’t really any photographs or images from that time. So I asked him to draw different memories from his childhood. One of them was this drawing of the sugarcane fields — he remembered the sugarcane being everywhere, really tall, and how he would play out in the fields at his friend’s family’s farm.
Later, we revisited that exact farm, maybe around 12 years ago, and it was completely cleared. It didn’t exist anymore, and nothing replaced it. That experience really deepened this idea for me of a kind of “ghost forest” — the way places can come and go, and what that says about the region, the economy, and these family histories. I had been thinking about that sugarcane image for a long time, and eventually, it came together with the idea of using hosiery to build this ghost forest in Sweetwater.
Can you talk more about the wall-based sculptures?
Many of the forms are made from industrial packaging molds — structural pieces designed to protect consumer products. I was drawn to them because they reminded me of Chinese characters — the inlays, the shadows, the shapes themselves. They also feel like fossils of global consumerism. I think a lot about manufacturing, the landscapes of production, and — coming from a background as both an artist and a fabricator — I’m interested in the backsides of things: the bodies and support structures that surround a commodity object but are usually hidden. To me, these packaging molds really convey that idea — they’re the negative space around an object, but just as crucial.
There’s also a pattern layered onto them. A lot of the imagery comes from graphic designs my father created for my family’s hosiery business in the ’90s. The brand was originally called Serena, which feels meaningful too.
The graphics were produced in Taiwan, but they were designed for a Western audience, which created these strange collisions between different aesthetics. Some show models wearing hosiery while holding instruments, and the marketing language would use phrases like “romantic knit” — odd translations that don’t always make sense. I’ve been really drawn to those images, and for Sweetwater, I appropriated them, collaging and image-wrapping them onto the surfaces of the packaging molds.
It mirrors the cultural blending at the heart of your work — neither entirely Taiwanese nor American, but constructed from fragments of both. It speaks to broader questions of Asian American identity, how it’s constantly evolving and individualized.
Absolutely. Many of these sculptures weave together different parts of who I am — my cultural background, material practice, and labor history.
