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. 

A mentor of mine once spoke about the silver thread that followed the spine, stretching into the sky to the far edges of the universe through the crown of the head, and descending through the sacrum into the core of the earth. The thread stretches upwards indefinitely through space. Through the spine we have access to our inherent divinity and it connects us with Heaven. Visualizing this silver thread has greatly widened my perspective as a human on this earth. In seeking more avenues to commune with my ancestors, I have found the spine as a point of interest and an important visual motif in the work.

The spine is our axis between heaven and earth. It is a site of structure that is simultaneously immovable and flexible. It is core to the body and supplier of the sympathetic nervous system. Every activity in the body is sent through the spine, every memory is processed through the spine. A physical protector of the self, it is a site for assertion and unwavering self worship. Through sculpture building, I am seeking to visualize my ancestral spine as the nerve, audacity, or bravery to exist fully. Transness is the body remembering itself, it is a connection with divinity. Through the lens of the spine, I can further access the depths and godliness within transgender identity.

My memories of Taiwan stay alive as I braid Taiwanese grocery plastic. It is ubiquitous in Taiwan, used to tie bundles of newspapers, tie off bags of street food, and to discourage flies around fruit stalls. I desire to fill my environment with as many nostalgic materials as I can find while living in the United States. Braiding and knotting this plastic into sculptural form brings me closer to my family through material familiarity. I wish to use the material as it is meant to – to save. Braiding the plastic, wrapping it around my fake urn, is a method of sustaining my Taiwanese visual language in my future. While I am braiding, knotting, or wrapping, each hand motion is a prayer. As I continue this practice, I grow closer to myself and my ancestors.

Using sculpture, I am inviting the audience to engage in a personal narrative of diasporic reconciliation and healing.