Artist Bio

For too long, women in their most natural state have been objectified, ogled, and punished for inhabiting their own bodies. It has never sat right with me that men can take their shirts off without consequence, while women are judged and policed for revealing even a small amount of skin. Throughout my work, I aim to confront this lens and redefine what feminine power can mean. I explore the feminine under my own gaze, using my body and lived experience as a starting point to celebrate the body while confronting viewers with their own biases, sexualizations, and socially constructed ways of looking.

My heritage as a Chinese American shaped my understanding of femininity through both cultural expectation and resistance, with women in my family often moving against tradition — leaving home, pursuing artistic lives, and defining themselves on their own terms. Living in Copenhagen and now Rome has expanded that perspective and introduced me to more outward expressions of autonomy and selfhood. These experiences have also shaped my interest in memory, connection, and the ways personal histories are carried through the body, gestures, and everyday interactions.

Working across painting, photography, digital media, and performance, I use the figure, self-portraiture, and gesture to explore the relationship between the body and lived experience. My work often returns to the hands as a means of expression and connection: gestures of intimacy, vulnerability, resistance, and communication. Through performance and multimedia, I extend these explorations beyond the image, considering how the body occupies space, interacts with others, and becomes both subject and participant.

I want my art to create tension: between the viewer and the work, between what has always been permitted and what is still, somehow, considered inappropriate. My work responds directly to the male gaze and its long history of framing women’s bodies as inherently sinful, dangerous, or temptress-like — bodies to be covered, judged, or explained away rather than simply seen. Women should not be punished for inhabiting their own bodies. Through my work, I want to put viewers face to face with their own discomfort and ask why a female body, represented without apology, still reads as transgression.