ARTIST STATEMENT:
I’ve been interested in the relationship between of writing and drawing in exploring identity, relationship, home, land, and belonging. For immigrants and the succeeding generations, if language is culture, what happens when severed from a mother tongue. What happens when separated from the physical land of ancestors? Can relationships, the bodies of loved ones, form a kind of stability akin to homeland?

Coming from a tri-lingual household, I’ve had a long-standing investigation of language and what is communicated and when language falls short or becomes a barrier. My parents spoke Taiwanese dialect, Mandarin Chinese, and English — each language broken into fragments, a rich albeit often incomplete tapestry though which to communicate. Speaking mainly English and only the tiniest bits of the other languages. I found language to be a vast territory of misunderstanding, and turned to the line of drawing as something with greater potential, something that could express the often unrecognized languages of the body, emotions, and liminal spaces.

The “Lineage” series of drawings are meditations on self, relationship, story, and history using fragments of line. They are an attempt to write a family history enshrouded in multiple languages, secrets, and silence. They grew out of a need to understand and explore where I come from. The results have been an interest in seeing the self as part of landscapes made of relationship, and an honoring of what was not known or spoken.