UC San Diego

a grain of rice embedded in my chest is an installation consisting of a central, wooden structure that holds material studies, ceramic sculptures, found objects, personal photographs, live plants, candles, incense, rice water, and uncooked jasmine rice. I am grappling with the intersection of an untold familial history and my queer personal history. This work extends a series of gestures of ancestral offerings, material investigations, and creative-ficiontal poetics that together contemplate endless possibilities across various temporalities. My conceptual framing is informed by racial melancholia theory, painterly methods of making, and Asian American literature, film, and poetry. By reaching backwards through time in this fragmented history and using fiction to bridge connections, I am able to orient myself as I move forward. As my immigrant mother felt the pressure to assimilate as a means to survive, I am now longing for something that has always been near yet just out of reach. By playing with dichotomies and 
hovering between them— real/not real, fiction/non-fiction, figurative/abstract, light/dark, masculine/feminine, past/future, near/far— this work contemplates endless potentialities of what is, what could have been, and what will be.