THE SPACE BETWEEN

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Medium: Interactive narrrative game
Tools: p5.js

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Fall 2022

Where do I belong if I am in-between two cultures?

This simulative, storytelling game expands on my navigation of multiple cultures as a Chinese adoptee growing up in a Korean-American household. It also draws from fieldwork I conducted within the Shanghai adoptee community in the Fall of 2021. Each chapter presents the user with a simple task, paying homage to iconic game styles of the 90s, while at the same time being a metaphor for one of the many challenges of juggling cultures.

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Medium: machine learning, video, installation, sound art
Tools: Webscraping, Stable Diffusion, Ableton

Shanghai, China, Spring 2024

This audiovisual installation investigates Wenming (文明), which translates to ‘civilization,’ ‘civilized,’ or ‘culture,’ as the interplay between identity, ethnicity, and digital space. While Wenming is often found in street signs, propaganda, and policy in the context of constructing a civilization by economic and technological means, I highlight how platforms like Kuaishou are sites for constructing ethnic identity and cultural authenticity that reveal a corporeal, intimate dimension of Wenming. Wenming works not only on the nation, state, and space but within citizens, bodies, and identities to fixate not ‘what’ is civilized, but ‘who’. Individuals are allowed to self civilize themselves so long as they fit within within the bounds of a racialized, gendered, and orientalized Other. I communicate this dynamic through reimagined Kuaishou videos created with a machine learning model trained on an original dataset I gathered through scraping the app, alongwith a soundscape mixed from real Kuaishou videos. Playing on mobile phones in a public restroom, a pinnacle of Wenming in modern urban space, I highlight a daily act of corporeal vulnerability with Wenming as a pervasive force that must be understood through its merging of on and offline structures of power and identity.

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