My practice investigates belonging as an embodied, unstable and relational condition. Working across moving image, performance, mark-making and writing, I use Chinese calligraphy ink, skin, costume, guzheng, gesture and camera as interconnected methods of enquiry. I approach painting, performance and film as an ecosystem through which diasporic selfhood can be rehearsed, fractured and re-formed.
Grounded in my experience of migrating alone from China to Aotearoa New Zealand as a teenager, the work examines how assimilation is learned through the body: via the correction of accent, the forgetting of custom, the desire to disappear, and the later attempt to recompose the self through image-making.
In this sense, my practice does not represent diaspora as a fixed identity, but investigates assimilation as a material, sonic and filmic condition that leaves traces on the body and its images.
