I cut things apart.

 

Paper enters the studio carrying instructions, transactions, photographs, borders, memories, and evidence of ordinary life. Through cutting, layering, sanding, and reconstruction, these systems begin to lose their authority. A document no longer identifies a person. A photograph no longer belongs to a single family. Information becomes material.

 

I learned papercutting from my father, who practices it as a traditional Chinese art form. I carry that knowledge forward not as a fixed inheritance, but as a method of reorganizing the world. Cutting is both destructive and generative. It breaks existing structures while creating new relationships that could not exist before.

 

This logic extends beyond the studio. My public sculptures translate the spatial language of papercutting into architecture, light, color, and shadow. Developed through conversations with local communities, they assemble many individual contributions into shared forms. Rather than illustrating a community, the work creates a structure through which individual voices, images, and histories remain distinct while becoming inseparable from a larger whole.

 

Whether working with fragments of paper or at the scale of the built environment, I am interested in how materials, images, and histories shift when they are removed from their original systems and placed into relation with one another.