About
MOVING IMAGE
Slimy & Sticky
Big Bellied Snail
BOOK
In Between
Slow or Slower
2025
Single channel video, mixed media
22:05
This work arises from the historical conditions of Chinese Indonesian diaspora—cycles of anti-Chinese violence, state and culture assimilation policies, and cross-border movements through which mobility gradually became a means of survival. My biological father’s life unfolded along these same historical fractures: from Indonesia to the United States, from the United States to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to Australia. Such a migratory trajectory produced a structural estrangement between us—an early rupture formed before I was old enough to understand, sedimented through silence and the dispersal of family memory.
After learning online that he had died, I entered a narrative composed of fragments. To build cognition of his death, I contacted relatives I had never met, and heard from family members their recollections of his character. These partial memories formed a discontinuous family archive. I travelled to Guangzhou in search of his grave, only to learn that the ashes had already been moved. The incompleteness of the ritual loosened the already drifting plates of kinship.
The work moves between these external encounters and the internal states they unsettle: conspiracy, hesitation, fear of genetic inheritance; a bloodline that binds yet renders us unable to coexist. Dreams, symbolic imagery, and documentary fragments intersect, allowing intergenerational loss to surface while never becoming fully graspable. What began as the search for ashes gradually transformed into a rewriting of intimacy and memory.
Ultimately, the work does not seek resolution. The so-called ‘answer’ is neither a tombstone nor a confirmation of the past, but an understanding of absence as a generative condition. As I trace the contours of what cannot be located or returned to, I turn back toward the question of my own existence—not to complete a narrative, but to inhabit the uncertainties that constitute it.