Crafting Desire: Queering the Red Sleep Bed highlights the intersectionality of culture and sexuality in the Taiwanese context. Crafting Desire: Queering acknowledges the problematic ideology within the material culture and provides a solution to break down the patriarchal system. It deconstructs the power structures embedded in the bed norm and rebuilds a queer heritage that reflects Taiwan's diverse and inclusive values nowadays. Firstly, by analysing the expression in the crafting of the Red Sleep Bed, the project recognises the oppressive stories that the bed carries and how it was used to promote gender stereotypes, patriarchy, fertility, and heteronormativity. Secondly, queering the Red Sleep Bed reclaims and transforms a traditional artefact in an attempt to embrace gender diversity. This work encourages viewers to reflect on binary thinking and recognise the experiences of queer Asians. By contextualizing traditional household furniture, this project explores the possibility of decolonizing queer Asians through the lens of materiality and craftsmanship. The accompanying video for this series can be viewed here.

This mini collection was created during my online artist residency with Brampton Arts Organization (formerly known as ACCIDA - Arts, Culture, & Creative Industry Development Agency). Joker: Wildcard, features seven garments accompanied with unique wheat pasted cardboard masks. Each of the garments was created from thrifted materials including bedsheets and curtains. While conducting material research during this residency, I wanted to explore the bridges between queer theory and adorning the queer body. Using textiles as the medium to showcase my intersectional identities, I attempted to create a framework of understanding my perspective of what it meant to be a queer, Filipino artist and translate queer theory into material practice. I often feel ostracized from my familial and Catholic upbringing for being queer, but also not feeling queer enough in relation to the Eurocentric vision of exploding queerness. Finding myself in a dichotomy that does little to explain and showcase my own experiences, I used this series as a portal to explain wanting to explore gender and sexuality beyond the conventional standards of beauty. Each of these garments, although dull in color palette, is filled with character and personality. There is a connection between the horrors of feeling excluded and the humors of living authentically. In other words, there is a connection between all my identities and my understanding of queerness cannot be removed from my religious background, my familial values, and the love I have for each of my communities. It is difficult to explain my version of being queer without also addressing feelings of fear and joy in conjunction with each other.

When you see my work will you ever know if I was ever gay or that I am a Trinidadian Chinese from my work without reading my bio? Does it matter to me? I am telling myself this as I write this statement. For a queer Trinidadian Hakka Chinese like myself I have lived with ambiguity my whole life when I have been told, “Oh I never knew there were Chinese from the Caribbean” or “Can you just become straight again?”, which has consistently challenged my identity. As an artist, I embrace this ambiguity in my work that confronts what it means to be queer, Hakka and Trinidadian, giving myself the space to reimagine how a queer Trinidadian Hakka Chinese body would look like. Having a fluid identity, inhabiting and flowing within the hyphens between cultures, through the construction of my memories, fantasy, and experiences within these various cultural identities. As an artist, I deconstruct these identities and choose what to emphasize or to hide which is the reflection of the struggles I had to endure within my own body. I use the transformative aspects of bronze casting and 3D printing to capture the shifting and mixing of cultures and identities in one body. I am making space for my body, family, ancestors, and the diaspora to become part of this ongoing process of identity production. I hope my work will bring joy and happiness to future queers from the diaspora and the wider Asian community.

Fruity Furniture Growing up, celebrations around food were integral parts of my experience with my grandparents and the primary connection to my Chinese heritage. Chinese traditions around food like Lunar New Year were always very fascinating and magical. And for a short while, I would be a part of something that felt like it came from another time. Often these celebrations were performed around the living room, a central gathering space in my Pau Pau and Gong Gong’s home, as we sat in a circular fashion around the room. The Fruity Furniture ties back to these memories of family connection and food celebration because the furniture become whimsical characters. The Fruity Furniture plays with the sense of wonder that I would experience as a child around food. Designed as small seats of varying proportions, the fruit collection allows us to live out childhood dreams of having food as big as our bodies and seeing the furniture as physical characters with identities of their own. Taking the embodiment of ‘fruity’ the furniture offers levels of whimsy and wonder that also ties to queer and soft identity. They are an expression of self, characters to cherish in your home that are meant to be shared collectively. The collection includes a pear, green apple, plum, peach and berry. Laced Bodies Being mixed-asian and queer is a tender experience, where one lives in the intersectionality of multiple experiences but also feels a lack of community while embracing each part of one’s identity. Being part of an in-between is an odd and frail experience, where the ability to see this state of being as something beautiful and powerful can be enriching but is sometimes hard to acknowledge. Laced Bodies is a tender lens that embodies the soft experience of feeling in-between. Through a coupling of glass ‘limbs’, the bespoke glass vessels are able to embrace through subtle bends and folds that mimic the human body. Each fold and curve of the glass reflects bodily forms while the pairing of the vessels reflects a sense of warmth through a fragile and cold material. The coupling vessels resemble a connection to community, identity, and self; their abstract forms allow the viewer to perceive their own personal reflection in the sculptures. By serving as a reminder to the body, the vessels portray the connection to self and other as a personal soft experience. Each vessel was hand-blown and shaped individually. Once cooled, the limbs were carefully assembled to match pairings to make each coupling unique. By using a natural material like glass, the vessels offer gradients of transparency, fluidity, and fragility that tie to the experience of being mixed. Laced Bodies was created in collaboration with design studio müsing–sellés in 2019. Naia Lamps The Naia Lamps are fleshy silk structures made of naturally dyed silk that are then pleated and folded in place with a silicone finish. The silicone is poured and spread on each lamp shade to mimic natural folds in cloth, the process of adding silicone allows that movement to be captured permanently. The lamp frames are made of thin metal rods that the lampshades are hand sewn onto with silk thread. The Naia Lamps are playful sculptural pieces inspired by fabric pleating, bodily forms, and soft sea creatures. This artwork was created by Jennifer Laflamme (@mifi.mifi) and Marisa Musing as MAMUMIFI (@mamumifi), a Toronto-based collective that explores building stories and creatures through objects and fantasy ethereal worlds. MAMUMIFI works through playing with various materials and compositions in the worlds of furniture, sculpture, digital, fashion and art. Their work lies in between functional and experimental design. Evolving projects around body, femininity, fluidity and our relationship to identity.

2033 Essex Rd, Williston, Vermont, USA, 05495 (2023 - ongoing) is inspired by the many small business awnings layering the present business name over the old, rather than removing the old cover before installation, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh, colonially known as Vancouver, BC (and where I also call home). For most of my childhood, my father did not live with me, returning to visit 2-3 times a year. As I got older, I learned that he was working at a Chinese restaurant in Williston, Vermont. The restaurant closed after a few years. This memory had disappeared from my mind until I moved to Montréal to continue my academic studies. The only things I know about this establishment are its name and address: East Orchid restaurant, 2033 Essex Rd. This piece reflects on these particular signs as interventionist: a queering, an act of behaving badly. Perhaps it is just a simple act resulting from convenience, but a suspension of time has been enacted. Simultaneous universes, places, histories are made space for. Restaurant awnings function the way printed matter “insist[s] on [...] encounter[s]”, as stated by Josh MacPhee: What might initially be read as carelessness or laziness, is actually the complete opposite. It is an example of how one can care for those that came before, a reminder that there will always be someone/thing after. How do we care for those who have yet to arrive, while thanking the ones who paved desire lines for us to flourish in the various gestures we make everyday? At the same time, this work is a way for me to acknowledge this (hi)story, one of many that go undocumented by institutions that don't deem this knowledge and these experiences as significant. Credit: Kyle Tryhorn

Digital Watercolour & Photography, Text Process-based Project since 2018 Fen-tao 分桃 Literal: the divided peach | Euphemism: homosexuality 异日，与君游于果园，食桃而甘，不尽，以其半啗君，君曰：爱我哉，忘其口味，以啗寡人。 及弥子色衰爱弛，得罪于君，君曰：是固尝矫驾吾车，又尝啗我以馀桃。—— 节选于《韩非子·说难篇》 "... One day, Mizi Xia and the Duke Ling of Wei were visiting an orchard. When Mizi found a tasty peach, he took a few bites; then, he gave the remainder to the Duke. The Duke was touched by the gesture and said, ‘you adore me so much that you are willing to share this tasty experience with me.’ As both men aged, the Duke’s attraction toward Mizi diminished. On another day, when Mizi offended the Duke, the Duke responded, ‘this person has offended me several times. For example, he had used the royal chaise by forging my name and authority. Furthermore, he once offered me a leftover peach that he no longer desired’...” -- Excerpt taken from Shui Nan (the Difficulties of Persuasion) by Han, Feizi; Translated by Eric Chengyang Bridging the East and the West, the Past and Present, this project pays further homage to the works by these contemporary artists: 1. “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. See it on MoMA online collection 2. “The Origin of Love”, written by Stephen Trask for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Listen to the official audio of Neil Patrick Harris’ version on YouTube

You’re here, too is a series of intimate portraits on being and becoming. Meditative in observation and evocative in tenderness, this work is rooted in meaningful witness between sitter and image-maker, marking a shared reflection on the nuances of queer Asian experience through moments of introspection, resolve, and solitude. The accompanying video for this series can be viewed here.