I was born in Taiwan, like my parents, but unlike my grandparents, who were from China. At five, I moved to Texas, then New Jersey, where I learned how to be American. At eleven, I returned to Taiwan, where I was suddenly expected to relearn how to be Taiwanese. This transition—marked by dislocation, resistance, and estrangement—unfolded under the shadow of “China,” a concept shaped by my grandparents’ memories and Taiwan’s authoritarian past. Yet I resisted forming a Taiwanese identity, still imagining myself in the American suburbs outside New York.

This ongoing state of transition continues to shape both my sense of belonging and my artistic practice—situated between the miasmic, sensory world of the Taiwanese wet markets of my childhood and the sterile chill of American supermarkets; between the lingering specters of authoritarianism in Taiwan and the imagined freedoms of American democracy.

During the pandemic, I overcame a childhood fear of water and learned to swim, transforming am early memory of near-drowning into a quiet form of resilience. I can now swim a mile nonstop, breathing steadily through each stroke. This personal transformation mirrors my artistic aim: to confront the collapsing waves of the past—the flood of memories, the erosion of time—and to continually reanimate the will to reimagine intergenerational trauma. In working with negatives, I move forward one breath, one exposure, one light at a time.