Statement
Migration as Impulse
I am a contemporary artist working with intricate hand-cut paper and installations that examine migration as a defining human impulse. From immigrant narratives, including my own, to humanity’s departure from nature through urbanization and into digital and interplanetary realms, I explore migration and diaspora as both lived experience and an evolving human condition.
Material and Authorship
Paper anchors this inquiry. Historically transmitted through trade, conflict, and cultural exchange, its global dissemination parallels the migrations I investigate. I choose Chinese Xuan paper for its suppleness and tensile strength, once reserved for male literati’s art, while papercutting was dismissed as rural women’s handicraft. By reclaiming this material through cut paper, I overturn hierarchies of art and craft, privilege and obscurity, access and exclusion. I place a fragile material within expansive spatial constructions, transforming it into 2.5-dimensional environments, imbuing the work with depth and luminosity through light and shadow play.
Photo courtesy of Meta
From Screen to Blade
My process begins digitally, where I layer and recontextualize hundreds of sourced and self-generated images into composite templates. These serve as guides for meticulous hand cutting. In the shift from screen to blade, solid and void function as interdependent forces. Cutting allows me to determine what remains and what is removed, each giving meaning to the other. Light moves through absence as much as form, casting shifting shadows that enliven the work and unsettle fixed boundaries between inclusion and exclusion.
Paper in Digital Realms
In recent years, I have extended this approach into 3D animation and augmented reality, carrying a tactile tradition into virtual space. Rather than abandoning hand craftsmanship, these explorations amplify it, placing paper within a broader conversation about materiality, authorship, and the evolving architectures of human experience.
Photo courtesy of Hong Kong Museum of Art