artist statement
'29 '1 '58 '48 '17
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I work with time-based/sculptural/multimedia installations, performance, diegetic prototypes, software, curation, and text as an inquiry into speculative mythscience, biotechnological processes, and bodily registers of harm and synergy. Interweaving design fiction, organic-synthetic processes, and fictioning in dialogue with diasporic lifeworld, cybergothic lores, and the technoscientific imaginary, my research and practice question and examine the artefacts of interspaces/non-places, and the entanglement of human/more-than-human agencies in continual processes of becoming and identity formation. Tracing the Sisyphean cycles that entwine the (non)human, abject, symbolic, and sacrificial, their work renders how the in-between in peripatetic and hyperstitional contexts, and the exigent and political nature of risk could be potentialised to destabilise and transform intricate structures of the socio-cultural macrocosms we exist in.
As a third generation US immigrant from the Canton region and raised as a third culture individual to a certain extent, my practice is catalysed by an itinerant upbringing across Seattle, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Detroit and London, life experience as a third culture individual, an architectural family background, and conundrums reflective of collective issues around precarity, expatriation, displacement, and agency. Various spaces are indexed and interpolated in my work —transitory/perpetual, (im)material interspaces. In my recent research projects, the referenced occurrences have transformed in a quasi-alchemical process from the immaterial to material, from events to material evidence and vestiges, and from the real to the parafictionalised. Through enactments of thought experiments and varied forms of reasonings applied onto the real life propositions, the research and work recurrently lead to or become visceral speculative Catch-22 scenarios and solutions. Seemingly implausible and complicit with the structures of power that the processes attempt to revolt against, but oftentimes the only viable ones left, these outcomes implicitly echo their Kafkaesque premises and refract the lifeworld within the current strange, uncertain era, ruptured by signs of the coming cultural shifts.
My working process is research-based, generative progression materialised from rhythms of spatial encounters, cultural theories, and observations of phenomena. I work across the mediums and often take considerations at the arrival of any discernible form on the material plane, spanning and yet intercepting their mediated agencies. During research oftentimes of an interdisciplinary nature, an exoskeletal framework of thought experiment(s) takes hold, built upon an internal structure of presuppositions, speculations, limit situations and non-sequiturs, leaving behind material and forensic vestiges to transpire and coalesce with one another in a constellational worlding/webbing of possibilities and narrativity. Collaborations across disciplines (with cryogenic scientists, biochemists, and computational architects, as in the recent research projects for instance) sometimes take place to further the interdisciplinary inquiry and actualisation of the thought experiment. A 'logically' sound framework is upheld as a principle (and to be potentially subverted), and yet by which frame of reference is contingent on the specificity of its subject matters.