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After becoming a mother, my studio migrated from the museum gallery to the nursery floor. In this era, parenting became my primary medium—not as a departure from art, but as a deliberate expansion of it. I stopped the exhausting performance of trying to balance my conflicting identities as a tired mother, an anxious software engineer, and a scared immigrant. Instead, I allowed their collision to guide me toward my most intuitive form of creation: becoming a parenting content creator.
Through this platform, I found a way not only to express myself, but to anchor and inspire other mothers navigating their own versions of this beautiful, chaotic intersection.
A Catalog of Inquiries
This selected collection of activities published in social media emerged naturally during the time I spent with my son. They are the spontaneous artifacts of our daily life.
Plushie Stand-up: Using various plush toys to perform "stand-up comedy" for my son. This became our unique way of early English exposure. Themes often touch, sometimes ironically, on my career development and status as an immigrant.
Sensory Bowling: Turning sensory massage balls into bowling balls to knock over "pins" made from containers filled with different kinds of beans.
Shadow Theater & B&W Cards: I used high-contrast cards for visual tracking exercises, then later cut out the black shapes to turn the remaining frames into a shadow theater on our nursery walls.
Rhythmic Spoons: Repurposing kitchen measuring spoons as Kuaiban (traditional rhythmic clappers) to beat out the rhythm while singing "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?"
Toy Magic: Using toy rings to perform "linking" magic tricks.
The Scrambled Egg Song: An original tune I composed. As my son started talking and singing, it evolved into our first duet.
Featured Work: Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes (Oct 2020)
This piece is a memorial to my grandfather.
Scrambled eggs with tomatoes was the dish my grandfather cooked for us most often during my childhood; it is the most defining flavor of my upbringing. He passed away while I was pregnant, but I wasn't told the news until my son was 100 days old.
While the high-contrast spiral serves as a functional visual stimulus for my newborn son, the spinning form acts as a bridge across three generations. My son, who never met his great-grandfather, is influenced by his legacy through the simple, rhythmic motion of paper and color. It is also an experiment in talking through the entire creative process. At the end of the day, the dish passes down to the next generation, anchored in love and memory.
Created during my internship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Great Wave Caprice explores how digital technology can enrich the appreciation of two-dimensional artworks. Using Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as a spatial blueprint, I reconstructed the mountain through an interactive 3D projection. By arranging paintings drawn from different perspectives onto a four-sided inverted pyramid, the structure itself becomes a surrogate for the mountain, allowing visitors to "walk around" the landscapes.
"I feel like I’m in Japan right now and I really walked that far."
"It’s amazing, like you’re creating waves on top of waves."
What’s the Point of View? is a digital deconstruction of Magritte’s 1935 masterpiece, The Human Condition. While the original painting thrives on the mystery of what remains hidden, my 3D Unity environment grants the viewer the forbidden ability to navigate behind the illusion. In doing so, the magic evaporates.
This piece is about the "breaking of a dream" — the realization that our desire to find a reality behind the image is the only thing truly there. When we are able to see the “back” of the window, we find not a hidden truth, but the mundane void of the construct.
Created during my first design bootcamp, PiNCH was my intuitive response to a typography challenge. Without a formal design background, I moved away from the screen and toward the material, physically pinching colored paper into the letterforms of the word itself. This tactile experiment won first place among 12 students — and two packs of Snickers.
On December 22, 2012 — the day after the predicted "end of the world" — I documented my reality at 39.98° N, 116.38° E (Beijing, China). Over an 18-hour period from 6 AM to midnight, I captured 12 photographs at 1.5-hour intervals, mapping them onto a physical globe. It is a study of a world that remained stubbornly unchanged even after its scheduled expiration. A log of the first day of a new era, anchored in the mundane. 2012.12.212 is a glitch in the calendar.
In this piece, t represents time along the x-axis. It is a sculptural paradox: from the top, the form follows the abrupt spikes of tan functions; from the side, it settles into the fluid oscillation of sin waves. I was intrigued by the shifting polarity of art — how we oscillate between celebrating neglected uniqueness and elevating overlooked everyday objects. Whether change is a gradual transition or a sudden rupture, it is all a matter of perspective. This work uses the mundane to map the mathematical heartbeat of aesthetic trends.
OUT is a self-meditation born from the quiet friction and the unspoken frenzy of curving my own future during graduate school applications. Using a system of iron wire tensioned by thread, I created a structure of held breath — much like a compressed spring. Together, these lines hold a hidden, kinetic strength; if a single thread is severed, the entire composition bursts.
A winter tradition reimagined. In Northern China, sausages are hung in the cold air to cure — a seasonal staple intended to sustain a household throughout the long winter. Here, the natural casing is filled not with meat, but with joss paper, the currency of the afterlife. This piece observes the self-destructive cycle of seeking profit through the degradation of life’s essentials. The "butcher’s cuts" were performed by a local vendor at his own booth, grounding the inquiry in the visceral marketplace.
Inspired by a summer at a Los Angeles language school — a literal "global village". UNchanged expresses the profound sense of belonging I felt among students of all races, complexions, and religions. I treated national flags as digital assets: selecting them at random, rotating them at varying angles, and applying transparency until their rigid boundaries blend into one another. These origami balloons represent children of mixed backgrounds — small as sand, but precious as pearls. They are a physical manifestation of a future woven from a delicate, transparent blend of our untold stories.
For years, Computer Science felt like a sterile desert of text. It wasn't until my senior year that I stumbled upon the "Event Listener" — the magic bridge where code finally met reaction. Programming then became a natural medium for interactivity: a way to capture movement, force, and physical impact.
Metamorphosis is a study of growth — an exploration of how we keep reacting and reshaping ourselves until we finally recognize the person we’ve become.
My first digital readymade from freshman year, created at the time when getting my first laptop opened the door to the magic of Photoshop. This collage is a tribute to Jimmy Liao, blending motifs from several of his picture books to capture a sense of gentle solitude. It mirrors the quiet tension of my early search between Computer Science I majored, and a reckless devotion to art. It is the art of choosing to be lost.
The urge to go to the restroom during a polymer clay class in my high school gave birth to my first masterpiece. I thought it could be hardened by microwave, but the whole piece turned into a lump of brownish melt.
