Year: 2025

Medium: Paper, Ink on Paper, String

Size: 38” x 44”

Others: For thousands of years, the Chinese have prayed for prosperity, longevity, and success for their sons and daughters. My family is no different, but our ideas of success often differ. This piece reflects the dissonance between the hopes of my family with my own desires. The phoenix, a symbol of the ideal daughter, rises from a wall of red envelopes: tokens of hope, fortune, and expectation. But the blessings are tangled, suspended, obscured by brushstrokes that resist easy legibility, reflecting how I not only read and write and speak in a foreigner’s tongue, but with a foreigner’s mind. Through this layered surface, I examine the weight of chasing my own dreams at the cost of being reborn, of making myself unfamiliar to those I love most.