In All Under Heaven, the body is an infinite continent. For me, it is a terrain to be discovered, negotiated, claimed, and surrendered. It is both border and homeland at once. It is profoundly ours.

Growing up as a Chinese immigrant in Canada, I learned to see myself through Western media and found myself lacking. I was too small, too quiet, too un-masculine, foreign and undesirable. The West, with its muscular heroes and celebration of individual emotional power, was seductive in its promise of visibility and agency.

To belong felt like a bargain: freedom in exchange for your truth.

These works hold that tension. Rendered in stark monochrome and wrapped in saturated cultural pattern, the body becomes a site where assimilation and cultural identity press against each other in transformative friction. At times the garment reads as armor; at others, as skin. Abstraction interrupts like doubt, or like history insisting on its presence.

I did not always love the body - my body. I have known its shame and fracture. But this series does not end in erasure. It moves beyond “either/or.” Instead of choosing between East and West, masculinity and tenderness, tradition and autonomy, I ask whether they can coexist without dominance.

Some works lean toward beauty as a statement of arrival. As the laying down of burden. Here, the body is no longer a battleground, but a universe capable of holding contradiction without fear. This is where what was once “wrong” becomes authored, integrated, and wholly mine.

Friday RSVP Evening: April 10th, 5-8pm w/ Artist Talk at 6pm
Show: April 10th - 24th