Drawn from the political conflicts and transformations in Eastern and Northeastern Asia during the two world wars, my practice is an inquiry into the shaping and forming of Chinese national identity in the context of multi-colonisation and occupation. Working with sculpture, perfumery, and the traditional craft of ink rubbing,  I seek to investigate the penetration of politics imbuing all other aspects of life; to discover the national abjection and pride at the moment of survival or defeat; and to juxtapose wartime propaganda and early-millennium internet subculture in an era in which politics has gradually become a form of entertainment and even a commodity. 

My works endeavor to construct both ephemeral and perpetual cultural spectacles, stimulated by rapid political transformations, by tracing and representing the long-ignored historical, political, and ideological complexity of Eastern and Northeastern Asia, and by challenging the oversimplified narratives forged during the Cold War that continue to shape Western interpretations of East Asian geopolitics. I question the legitimacy of dominant Western assumptions about the twenty-first-century geopolitics of Eastern and Northeastern Asia, many of which remain largely inherited from the Cold War’s deliberate illustrations and unsolved political issues left by the chaos following the end of the two world wars.

By reviewing the variations and correlations in political patterns before, during, and after wartime, I contest the modern singular identity based on political ideologies and nationalities defined by the division of sovereign states. Instead, my works reconstruct a pre-treaty imaginary of national identity that once existed before the territorial partition within the designated modern international order — a pattern was first established by a world-scale constituent violence in favor of colonialism and imperialism, at the cost of compromises made by many marginal and colonised polities.