Carving in My Past Lives
The work examines how women’s hairstyles in pre-modern East Asia were documented and reframed through Western photography. In back portraits found from private and commercial photo albums, the East Asian hair becomes a blackhole, where the identity, nuanced by race, ethnicity and social class, is reduced to an oriental symbol.
To counter this flattening construction, I paint over the photographs with rice, a material deeply tied to East Asian identity. I draw on Western myths and religious narratives in which hair is charged with vitality - serving as a source of strength and sustenance. From these stories, I distill symbolic motifs and translate them into hieroglyphic patterns. Rice becomes the blood and flesh that reanimates these patterns, resurrecting the empty oriental symbol with life.
The work examines how women’s hairstyles in pre-modern East Asia were documented and reframed through Western photography. In back portraits found from private and commercial photo albums, the East Asian hair becomes a blackhole, where the identity, nuanced by race, ethnicity and social class, is reduced to an oriental symbol.
To counter this flattening construction, I paint over the photographs with rice, a material deeply tied to East Asian identity. I draw on Western myths and religious narratives in which hair is charged with vitality - serving as a source of strength and sustenance. From these stories, I distill symbolic motifs and translate them into hieroglyphic patterns. Rice becomes the blood and flesh that reanimates these patterns, resurrecting the empty oriental symbol with life.
