I love observing people’s lives, especially those different from my own. I think it is both the geographic distance and cultural difference that elevate my curiosity. When I relocated into a Western culture, the geographic migration brought me new insight into the cultural milieu of my native East. My work tells stories, personal experiences, and my renewed connection to my cultural tradition and Eastern origin. The transformations in my own life and in Chinese culture are new inspirations for my creative expression.
The dialogues between past and present, East and West, nature and culture are recurring themes in my work. The boundaries between these themes might be clear or blurred as they appear in the real world. My memories, reflections, and contemplations are interpreted into visual languages of image, layering, light, and shadow, and material then applied in space.
I attend to the interplay of textile with space and invite audiences to participate in their interaction. Surface images are often loaded with cultural interpretations. They allude to tradition yet dissolve into modernist aesthetic expression. Layering not only refers to the explicit overlapping of material and imagery, but also implies a juxtaposition of times, cultures, and aesthetics.
An evolving hybrid-making process, which blends digital and manual skills and integrates traditional techniques with new innovations, comes naturally to my work; it fits into my transcultural perspective and position.
