︎




Mitla in Chaos


2020.2
weaving

Arquetopia Residency
Oaxaca, Mexico





         
                                                                                                                                               





                                                                                      

         How I feel, trapped in my consciousness                           








MasC


2019
virtual environment created with Maya, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine 4





a modern mask shop


when self-expression is manufactured and capitalized

Kute Kingdom



2019
virtual environment created with
Maya, Substance Painter and Unreal Engine 4





....
This is a world in which the citizens gather around the statue of the kawaii god, to collectively meditate and generate specific ranges of brainwaves that will be collected, transformed and disseminated to power the the city.






“Cute is attuned to an era that is no longer as wedded as it once was to hallowed dichotomies like masculine and feminine, sexual and nonsexual, adult and child, being and becoming, transient and eternal, body and soul, absolute and contingent, and even good and bad—dichotomies that once structured great ideals but that are now taken to be less hard-and-fast, more porous than had been traditionally assumed.”


-- Simon May, The Power of Cute

Eusapia


--

“No city is more inclined than Eusapia to enjoy life and flee care. And to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground...

“They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia...And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.

“They say that...actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.”

                                                                                        --- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
1

.
.
2

Business Today Illustrations



1
Spring 2019
Intel and Esports: Staying on Top
link


2
Fall 2018
Belt and Road Initiative
link
 



Alternative Book Covers


2018-2019

 


 


 





Gallery for Moses


2019.4
duration: 1 mo

thesis: extreme views of falling and power exchange

Spatial Relationship Study


2019.2-3 
duration: 1.5 mo

thesis: dualities in unity


The model is mainly formed through two triangular volumes that are connected by lines. Similar elements (2 “L” shaped planes in different sizes, as well as a hinged rectangle with windows) mirror each other diagonally across the front and the back.

I used two sets of axes that are 45 degree apart, and employed the two thin, straight lines from the given elevation as two guiding lines of the model, forming an “x” at the center of the plan. The front side follows the elevation plan, with most of the rectangles being planes turned by 45 degrees to the same direction. Looking from the top, the turned plans become lines, while originally hidden “ribbons” reveal themselves as they run from bottom to top, or top to bottom, connecting the two major triangular volumes.  

In addition, I sought to develop my architectural language by forming volumes with minimal planes that connect with each other at corner points, and I explored the hinges in particular.

The model presents different levels of solidity and opennessat different angles or from different sides.


 .        

Soundspace


2018.7
duration: 1.5 wk

site: under the highline,

w. 22nd street at 10th avenue, south side of the street



thesis: 
a parallel experience with what’s above the High Line

a contrasting texture with the structure of the High Line



dark v.s. bright
heavy v.s. light
industrial v.s. organic








around each opening are recordings taken from above the highline

each sound/recording drifts in and out of the visitor’s ears as the visitor move in and out of th

e circular openings


in the middle of an opening, the visitor hear the symphony of all sounds, just as one hears on top of the highline


The Drifting World

2018.1

In exploration of the relationship between the individual and the collective, this experimental video juxtaposes zoomed-in visual spaces of bubbles, cooked rice and melting wax, with sounds gathered from public urban settings like in the trains, subways, and on the roads. 

link to video





Floating

2017


These paintings, done in the same summer, collectively reflect my feeling for the world: individuals floating about in the vast wave of the collective. 



Your Half Fortunes

2017
resin, transparent vellum

I asked students, faculty and staff of my high school to write down a fortune for themselves. When they came to the show, they had to flip over numerous resin hemispheres on which texts were suspended until they found their own fortune. Visitors to the show could also write down their fortunes on the cards I had prepared, and stick them around the pedestal.

Many of the hundred fortunes mentioned the words “love” and “happy” - reminders to take better care of themselves. After reading each fortune over and over, one classmate whom I barely knew personally told me she had written an anonymous note for another school project that I shared online, with the words, “I have a constant fear that I am not enough.” At this exhibition, she wrote a card saying, “you are always enough.”

This work enabled me to connect with my community. I felt fortunate to help convey the participants’ tender and honest sentiments with relative simplicity and emotional depth and see how we all share similar hopes and fears.

Life 

Life Soup

2016
performance at RISD


I made paper pulp “life soup” for my audience. Each “customer” could pick up to two life flavors from my menu. I shredded slips of paper with images corresponding to the “flavors” and placed them into a blender with water. Customers could tear away any parts of the self-guidance books on topics including marriage, career, or faith as their add-on ingredient. The paper would deform in the swirling warm water into paper pulp. Customers could then pick a poem from a 500-page collection as their “topping.” Finally, they would “pay” me with life tips they wrote anonymously.

The final product of Life Soup was, of course, not edible. But it was the process of each person making choices that mattered more: what life ‘flavor’ to pick, what issues seemed pertinent, what literary language resonated, etc. It was also interesting to be the artist and observe the process. I watched “happy” quickly run out, and “wealthy” almost remain in full stock. Most of the life tips were about staying true to oneself. 

It was also interesting to be the artist and observe the process: “happy” quickly ran out; most of the life tips were about staying true to oneself.

Finding the Shortest Path


2017
charcoal, watercolor
43 in. x 31 in.

Traffic lights are regulators: they point at the right direction at the right time. But what if they turn green in every direction? This is the confusion my generation often faces. Whereas a world full of red lights can seem hopeless, a world full of green lights deludes people into believing they own the key to success.


[Paper]

Neuroscience informs design, now what? Towards an awe-inspiring spatial design


published in
Conscious Cities Anthology 2019:
Science-Informed Architecture and Urbanism



[Gallery]

Awe-inspiring spatial design 
-- with examples from art and architecture


visual supplement to the research

The Architecture of Awe


independent research at UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center, with guidance from David Yaden
1

The Silence that Did Not Let Others In


John Cage, Susan Sontag, encoding/decoding theory
2019.5
.
.
2

Transferred Nostalgia of the Kowloon Walled City


globalization, urban memory
2019.3
.
.
3

On Rational Being and the Gallery Park


The High Line, The Tragedy of the Commons
2019.3
.
.
4

Can Abstract Art Be Propaganda?


Abstract Expressionism, Cold War
2017.5

Academic Writing
1
 
.
.
2

.
.
3

Puzzles



1

Let’s Care About Starving Artists

[pdf] [solution]
Princeton Puzzle Hunt 2019
Meta 2


2

Photo Album

[pdf with solution]


3

Calligraphic Cures

[pdf]
Phillips Exeter Academy Puzzle Hunt 2017
Meta 5




1
   
.
.
2
  
  

.
.
3

.
.
4


2D Design Collection


2018-2019

1
Princeton Coffee Club
Poster, ID sticker 


2
Princeton Puzzles
Poster, logo, website


3
Princeton Israel Tiger Trek
Logo


4
PEA Puzzle Hunt 2018
Website
“Let's absurdify life, from east to west. Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living.” (Fernando Pessoa)