About the fabric books:
This series of fabric books taking a closer look at the productive role of absence in archives, through the creation of textile books about second-hand memory and unknown inheritance in my Chinese-Vietnamese family.
How do we reframe the yearning to find missing images into a space of potential? Diasporic storytelling often finds itself in the gaps of second-hand memory: stories that might be retold slightly—or completely—differently depending on the listener, the preparation, the trust, and even the weather. Instead of looking for evidence of a singular truth, I want to create vessels that can contain multiple absences and contradictions, in recognition of the very human unreliability of recollection.
Through fragmentary accumulation, I will center my material exploration on found objects, misprints, and scraps from my studio and scans of my grandparents’ remaining photo albums to create three fabric books. Instead of looking primarily at the subject of the photographs, I will be focusing on the containers’ personal structures: scrapbooking techniques, marginalia, personal notes, and bookmarks. I take inspiration from Louise Bourgeois’ 2002 edition of ‘Ode à l’oubli’ (translated from French as ‘Ode to Forgetting’), a book of lithography on textile and fabric collages, sourced from the artist’s wedding six decades earlier. Simultaneously an homage to—and an exorcism of—nostalgia, Bourgeois’ work demonstrates how encyclopedic formats can be imbued with personal affect across more than half a century.
The View from Here
oil on sewn canvas, 24” × 18”, 2026
Again
oil on sewn canvas with embroidery floss, 36” x 48”, 2026
Installation view of the fabric book on the right and ‘Too Early’ on the left. Group exhibition ‘The Textility of Organisms’ curated by Fei Yu at Hive Centre for Contemporary Art, Shanghai.
Jaywalking
Hand-embroidery on cotton twill, linen thread binding, fabric scraps, cyanotype, DMC thread
10” x 10”
2025-26
Installation view of the fabric book on the right and ‘Too Early’ on the left. Group exhibition ‘The Textility of Organisms’ curated by Fei Yu at Hive Centre for Contemporary Art, Shanghai.
