Mixed media, performance, photography, video stills.

Wishing Well is an ongoing body of work that explores objects, rituals, and the act of myth-making. Rooted in ancestral Chinese practices of celebration and mourning, the series draws from both my family’s archives and my own photographs to create photo sculptures. Through these works, I explore how objects hold our dreams, wishes, and spirits– how they become vessels for what we hope to preserve and send onward.

This work began after the passing of my maternal grandfather in 2021. With Hong Kong and China’s borders closed during COVID, and being stuck far from home, I found myself searching for ways to grieve and celebrate his life through art-making. For three years, I worked with what I had with me: a small carry-on suitcase and a box of family photographs.

I became drawn to the idea of smoke. Across many cultures, smoke is believed to carry the living’s wishes into the heavens. Whether blowing out candles on a cake or burning joss paper for the dead, smoke transforms our desires into something that drifts to a realm beyond ours.

These photo sculptures are not meant to last. They are made to be transformed, to take on another life beyond their material selves. For this series, I created my own joss paper suits and edible photo cakes from both found and personal archives that hold special meaning for my family.

Moon, my sister, making a wish over a homemade photo cake of my great-grandmother making a wish on a pile of 寿桃包 (Longevity peach buns) on her birthday.

This is a work-in-progress of joss paper suits that I am creating. In this particular pattern on the suit, are scans of a dream journal [dated 1907] that I found at an antiques market in Hang Zhou, China. In the front of this book is a 祖谱 [Genealogy/family tree], and in the back of this book is a dream journal. On this page of the dream journal, this person writes about their dream of clouds forming into a stairway into the sky. I loved this imagery. The idea that this dream journal was possibly preserved because of the family tree really struck me. I hope to make more personalized patterns for joss paper suits and joss objects that I will be making and burning. This handmade joss suit was burned on Chinese Ghost Festival in 2025.