Project 3 YOU, ME, AND THE CITY THAT HOLDS US
My work explores the city as a field of relationships, an ever-shifting network of roads, infrastructures, bodies, ecologies, and systems that continuously shape one another. Cities are often understood through their architecture or skylines, yet what fascinates me is the invisible web beneath them. Major roads branch into smaller streets like veins across a body. Transit lines, utilities, data flows, and human movement overlap into a dense choreography of dependence and exchange. Nothing exists independently. Every path, structure, and decision is tied to countless other forces unfolding simultaneously.
Through projection mapping, I layered roads, topographies, and infrastructural networks onto speculative urban forms to reveal the hidden relationships embedded within the built environment. I am interested in how cities hold contradiction. They connect and isolate. They create intimacy through density while also producing anonymity. Within the scale of the contemporary city, the individual often feels impossibly small. Towers rise beyond comprehension. Networks stretch farther than we can perceive. We move through systems we did not design and rarely fully understand. Yet there is something profoundly human in that smallness. To feel small within the city is also to feel connected to something larger than oneself, to become part of a collective rhythm of movement, labor, memory, and survival. We are urbanism as much as we inhabit it.
My work critiques the illusion that infrastructure is neutral or purely functional. Roads, transit systems, and networks are social instruments that shape who belongs, who moves freely, and who is pushed to the margins. A highway cutting through a neighborhood becomes an act of separation. A transit gap becomes an absence of opportunity. Networks distribute not only movement, but also power, visibility, and access. The city is never fixed. It is an ongoing negotiation between competing desires, between efficiency and care, expansion and preservation, individuality and collectivity.
The projected layers in my work flicker like unstable memories or living organisms, exposing the city as unfinished and unresolved. I do not see utopia as a perfected condition free from conflict. Instead, I see it as the capacity to continuously renegotiate our relationships to one another, to infrastructure, and to the landscapes we occupy. My work asks how cities might become more conscious of the systems they produce and more attentive to the fragile human connections that exist within them.
Project 2 STAIRS
The captions in STAIRS operate like misaligned instructions embedded inside familiar cinematic moments. They do not describe the films directly so much as expose latent spatial or emotional movements already present within them, then twist those movements into a directive that feels both accurate and slightly wrong. Each pairing creates a kind of friction between what the film shows and what the caption insists. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), the caption “ALL THE WAY DOWN” is a reference to the famous Odessa Steps sequence. The relentless descent of bodies, carriage, and chaos down the monumental staircase becomes an image of collective collapse. Inception (2010), captioned “GO AROUND”, shifts attention to the film’s obsession with architectural paradoxes and dream logic. Mazes that fold into themselves, staircases that loop impossibly, corridors that refuse linear navigation. Joker (2019), I captioned Arthur Fleck’s unstable bodily presence, especially his iconic stair dance “FALL DOWN”. Falling is no longer an accident but propulsion, an inevitability and a descent mistaken for direction. Psycho (1960): “UP ONLY” is an ironic insistence on ascent within a narrative structured by repression, doubling, and buried violence framed by the Bates Motel staircase In Labyrinth (1986), “GET LOST” is almost too precise. The film itself is structured as intentional disorientation: corridors that shift, staircases that lead nowhere stable, space that reorganizes itself around confusion. Finally, The Truman Show (1998) has the clearest directive: “LEAVE”. The word is both instruction and rupture, echoing Truman’s final movement toward the collapse of a fake world built around him.
Project 1 Cartographies of Home
This triptych reflects on the experience of growing up abroad as a child of expatriates, where the idea of “home” was always temporary. Moving between houses in the same neighborhood meant that place was never fixed; each address held a fragment of a life that was constantly shifting. During a visit back over winter break, I returned to several of the houses my family once lived in across the same neighborhood in Taiwan. Although the buildings still stand, they no longer hold the lives that once unfolded inside them. I photographed these houses and overlaid fragments of maps to trace the spatial relationship between them, revealing how close they were geographically, yet how distant they feel in memory. The upper portions of each panel show the present-day houses as they exist now. The lower sections interrupt these images with bold fields of color where I mask out the current reality and insert personal memories from living there as a child. These inserted photographs act as small windows into moments that no longer physically exist: playing, resting, and everyday scenes of my childhood life. By partially obscuring the buildings, I want to acknowledge how memory both preserves and distorts the past. The map lines that run across the panels are emotional topographies, tracing invisible routes between the houses and the lives that unfolded within them. For many expatriate children, identity is constructed through a patchwork of temporary homes rather than a single place of origin. The houses themselves have changed: new paint, different residents, altered surroundings, but the memories remain layered onto these sites. By masking the present and reconstructing fragments of the past, I hope to reclaim spaces that once shaped my sense of home.
One Image Raster Exercise
I created this piece in Photoshop by combining multiple raster images and experimenting heavily with layer blending modes, opacity, masking, and texture overlays. The process began with a dark base layer to establish depth and contrast. I then layered photographic textures and abstract light effects on top, using blending modes such as Screen and Color Dodge to intensify the bright whites and neon blues without completely flattening the darker areas. These settings allowed the luminous elements to glow through the composition while preserving detail underneath.
The vertical lines were developed through stretched textures and manipulated image fragments, layered repeatedly with varying opacities. I used Overlay and Soft Light blending modes to merge these streaks into the background so they would feel embedded rather than pasted onto the image. To create the large circular forms, I introduced solid black shapes and softened their edges slightly with feathered masks, allowing them to feel suspended in space rather than completely flat.
Additional splatter textures and noise layers were added to introduce movement and imperfection. Many of these textures were set to Lighten or Linear Dodge, creating the scattered glowing particles across the image. I also duplicated and mirrored portions of the composition near the bottom to create the reflective effect, lowering the opacity and adding blur so the reflection appeared atmospheric and unstable.
One Image Vector Exercise
The piece was created in Adobe Illustrator using a combination of vector tracing, texture overlays, clipping masks, and layer transparency settings. I began by building the composition through simple geometric divisions, separating the canvas into contrasting spatial zones. The left side was developed using imported raster textures that were image-traced into vector forms. After expanding the trace, I manipulated the texture using threshold adjustments and recolored it into a limited palette of olive green and black. This created a dense field of marks that feels both digital and tactile.
On the right side, I introduced simplified furniture silhouettes and abstract shapes drawn with the Pen Tool and Shape Builder Tool. Each object was intentionally flattened into bold blocks of color to contrast against the highly detailed texture beside it. The chairs were slightly distorted and rotated to destabilize their functionality and create a sense of imbalance or collapse.
Layer organization became central to the composition. Different elements were separated into overlapping layers with adjusted opacity settings to create subtle spatial relationships. I used Multiply blending mode on certain texture layers so darker grain patterns would merge naturally into the forms beneath them, while lighter objects retained a more graphic presence through Normal or Screen settings. Clipping masks were also used to contain textures within specific shapes, particularly in the central vertical form, allowing the rough surface treatment to feel embedded rather than applied superficially.
The restrained color palette was intentional. Muted greens, cream tones, and isolated bright colors create tension between calmness and disruption. The red circular form and yellow chair interrupt the otherwise balanced palette, drawing attention to instability within the composition.