I'm working on my next solo show!
If you’d like to read this blog post with its intended formatting, here is the permalink.
Hi there! I have some really REALLY exciting news today (that I’ve been holding back for weeks):
!!!🎊 I’m having my next solo art show in Tokyo this fall 🎊!!!
If you’re in town, the dates are September 23–28, 2025, with the opening reception on the 23rd and a panel discussion on the 27th. The show will conclude an artist residency at MIDORI.so Studio, where I’ve been experimenting with silkscreen printing for the past month (more on that later).
It’s my first solo show in 2.5 years. At the height of all the logistics and planning for Tokyo last year, I started to really lose sight of what I was even doing it all for. I ended 2024 scared that, after all the work of setting up Tokyo, I wouldn’t have any art left in me to express (lol how dramatic).
But as I was working on the application for this residency, I remembered Sherry Zheng’s show in the same MIDORI.so gallery last November, “Cocoon: Exploring the Asian Diasporic Identity.” Those three worlds wouldn’t leave my mind: Asian Diasporic Identity.
Two years ago, I completed my thesis project about Chinese immigration into America from 1850 to present. I started the research with a nagging feeling that I needed to understand Chinese-American history to understand myself. The research took me to a passage from Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know: “I also spoke to dozens of Asian children of immigrants — Asians of my generation[…]everyone always wanted me to know that their parents were good people. They came here with nothing; they overcame so much. They’re just, you know. Stoic. Anxious. Quiet.”
I became fascinated with this dichotomy of being an immigrant arriving in a new country so filled with hope and expectations, and finding a vastly different reality. And as I continued on the project, another phrase kept repeating in my head: we keep searching for home, for a place of belonging.
That’s where this show picks back up. It is a multi-layered, multi-modal exhibition centered around home, places of belonging, and the immigrant experience, told through an Asian diasporic lens.
Messy, emotional, imperfect, and imprecise
I mentioned earlier that as part of my studio residency, I am exploring silkscreen printing. And you might be wondering, why screenprinting?
When I completed my first semester of grad school, I realized that if I wanted to create physical work, I needed to better understand physical materials and processes. I’m a firm believer that creativity comes from really knowing how something works, and learning how to take advantage of that in interesting ways. I took a myriad of workshops, ranging from glass (glassblowing, flameworking, neon bending), to riso printing, mineral pigment painting, and even washi paper making — essentially trying to cobble together my own art school education. But nothing quite clicked until I tried screen printing.
I am fascinated by the tension between the precise and imprecise, the pixel perfection we can get on a screen and the inherent noisiness of the physical world. The silkscreen printing process involves both: It’s possible to create a precise design on a computer, but transferring that design from a silkscreen onto a physical surface introduces variability that is inherent in the texture of the material, the viscosity of the pigment, the pressure our hands apply. While a screenprinting artist might strive for precision and perfection, I am interested in that imperfection: the colors that are slightly offset because the registration isn’t perfect, the paint that smudges as the paper moves slightly on the second pass.
I first wrote about this tension two years ago in an essay for Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society, entitled “Senses & Sentiment: When Data Is Too Emotional for the Screen.” In it, I make the case that there are some data stories — the incomplete ones, the messy ones, the emotional ones — that are best suited as a physical data experience.
Across my decade-plus of working in data communication, I have come to believe that it’s easy to conflate data with fact when so much of it is visualized and consumed through a digital screen, where spreadsheets, tables, charts, graphs, and diagrams show numbers in convincing pixel precision. And perhaps even worse, the very way we collect our data forces it into discrete rows and columns — a representation that is easy for machines to digest yet is completely devoid of its original context and meaning.
So I began to experiment with watercolors and water-based inks — pigments that run freely and messily — to recapture the fullness and richness of what the data represents.
Chinese calligraphy ink, Arduino, peristaltic pump, stepper motors, motorized fan, fabric.
My thesis project was one of those experiments: “Untitled (we still land, home),” drips Chinese calligraphy ink on flowing fabric, each droplet representing groups of Chinese people that have arrived in America since 1850. Despite being a government dataset, it contained missing years and undercounted entries because some ports of entry failed to submit their immigration numbers.
As I worked on the project, I couldn’t help but think about the millions of lives that were recorded, and the unknown numbers that were not — either by intention or carelessness. And I wondered, what did these immigrants leave behind? What hopes did they arrive with? Did they ever fulfill their dreams? As the beads of ink land and flow across the fabric, I saw myself, my family, the millions I’ve never met, and I imagined their stories spreading, unfolding, freely.
Third spaces and belonging
Recently, I had the pleasure of being on an artist panel in Tokyo to talk about third spaces — a space that is neither home nor work, but a gathering place that fosters belonging and community.
I previously wrote that I believe physical data experiences can bring people together. I’ve seen it firsthand exhibiting my own art: When I shared my pandemic experiences in my New York show, wonder & hope, I saw people smile and tear up as they internalized my story, and then they came and shared their pandemic stories with me. When I shared my struggles of getting my period as a teenager, other women told me their experiences, and we laughed. And I will never forget the person who sat down with my thesis project about Chinese immigration for twenty minutes, silently watching. Then, the next day, their friends and classmates came, and told me about how that person had raved about my piece.
I grew up in four different countries, speaking three different languages. I feel like a perpetual foreigner wherever I go. I’ve always struggled with a sense of belonging.
Once in a writing class in grad school, we were challenged to introspect on why we create for a public. I wondered why I feel such a deep need for others to see my work — was it purely ego? And I realized, certainly, ego is a part of it, but more than anything I yearn to be seen and understood. And there are things that, even with all my different languages, I struggle to express in words. They come to me first as whispers of images, and so I make my art, and through that process I come to understand myself. Then, I offer those deepest, most personal parts of me for others to see themselves, and for us to connect via our shared experiences.
In that artist panel I realized: When I show my art, that physical location becomes my temporary third space. For that brief, beautiful moment, it becomes my place of belonging.