A Meditation on Unseen Selves
In a world increasingly obsessed with definitions, categories, and rigid frameworks, there are artists who quietly, powerfully, and poetically rebel against them. One such artist offers a multi-sensory confrontation with identity and impermanence, where humour and pain coalesce, and where truth refuses to be singular.
Her project Shapeless Ephemerality is not just a body of work — it is a suspended emotional state. A haunting, philosophical meditation that asks: Who are we beyond the roles we’re forced to play? What would our mothers have become had they been free from their generational scripts? It is a work born from a deeply personal bond — the daughter–mother relationship — but expands far beyond into questions of time, memory, and metaphysical identity.
The piece doesn’t answer; instead, it dwells — in ambiguity, in duality, in liminal space. Light dances with shadow. Form dissolves into the abstract. Meaning emerges only through tension.
Inspired by Everything Everywhere All at Once and grounded in the theories of László Moholy-Nagy and Taoist philosophies of being/non-being, Shapeless Ephemerality is an intimate study of self and other — and the impossible chasm between them.
“We are both liberated and trapped,”
the artist says of herself and her mother. “I’ll never know her beyond the role I’ve been taught to see her in.” In this haunting premise, the artist excavates the idea of memory not as truth, but as a filtered fiction — subjective, inherited, and fading.
Then comes the sharp pivot: Peeling of a Banana. A project as jarring as it is humorous. Personifying the “banana” — a colloquial (and ironic) term used in East Asian diaspora to describe someone “yellow on the outside, white on the inside” — the artist turns a personal wound into satire, reflection, and celebration.
It’s an ode to the younger self who was once afraid to take up space, to the years spent disassociating from heritage, and to the joy of finally owning complexity.
“The boldness wasn’t who I was as a kid — it’s who I wanted to be,” she reflects. Playing with the language of colour, transparency, and masking, the work dissects the immigrant experience through a lens that is deeply poetic, yet unapologetically confrontational. “There’s gravitas in humour,” she adds. “As a kid, humour was my defense. Here, it’s my liberation.”
What connects both projects is a commitment to truth without resolution. An acceptance that struggle, contradiction, and dissonance are not things to “fix,” but spaces to create within. “My process is a hot mess,” she laughs. “But it’s an honest one. The best things come out of struggle.”
Though her work resists labels, it is undeniably political, poetic, and personal — because it is real. “Everything is political. But I don’t set out to make statements. I try to make sense of myself. If that resonates with others, then that’s the magic.”
Though her work resists labels, it is undeniably political, poetic, and personal — because it is real. “Everything is political. But I don’t set out to make statements. I try to make sense of myself. If that resonates with others, then that’s the magic.”
Check More Incredibility Around The World