Within the work, there is an inherent underpinning of reverence and veneration. My personal relationship with ancestral prayer and the linkage it creates between the living and the dead has greatly influenced my sculptural practice. This is evident through my use of funerary papers and incense, joss paper, and embalming processes using wax. Practicing a means of entering an other-space and “speaking” to my ancestral spirits creates a foundation of piety upon which the work is then built. The sculptural work is birthed mainly from grieving and mourning, and acts as a physical exploration of what generational healing can look like, feel like, and mean. 

My practice’s physical manifestations are related directly to my upbringing in that I have taken everything I learned in the kitchen to the studio. My parents and grandparents taught me about spiritual survival in a diasporic context through their meals. I recognize the power in Chinese cooking as a way to revisit and celebrate an ancestral home. When I cook and make sculpture, familial history stays alive within and through me. I engage with materials through many cooking processes—folding, mashing, boiling, melting, heating, molding, drying, soaking, and arranging. I prioritize the “voices” of the materials: I do not push a material to do anything outside of its innate abilities, but act as a guide for it to do as it will. And just as my grandmother prepares a meal for our family, I approach my work with the same curative intentions, namely to share a sense of revitalization. 

My forms are influenced by mountains and caves, the interior and exterior human landscape, and the fluidity of smoke in the air. I am inspired by the visual similarities shared between geologic bodies and human bodies, such as the cracking of rock and drying of skin, and see smoke as a visual passage between the living and spirit worlds. My materials range from melted wax, turmeric, rice, joss paper, and dyed water to found plastic vessels and steel. Physically, the work oscillates between chaotic and organized visual languages, old age and new growth, found and formed, edible and inedible. I create forms prioritizing a spectrum of feelings, textures, and colors that coexist within one ambiguous environmental body. Using sculpture, I am inviting the audience to engage in a personal narrative of diasporic reconciliation and healing.