I was born and raised in Beijing, where my filmmaking began through experimental ethnographic work grounded in observation and immersion. After relocating to the United States, I continued this practice in Milwaukee and Philadelphia—two cities whose contrasts deepened my sense of identity, displacement, and belonging.
My work moves through the in-between, where cultures meet, blur, and resist one another. Inspired by Joyce Wieland’s playful use of the everyday and Rea Tajiri’s layering of memory and history, I turn to humor, rituals, and silences as quiet sites of meaning. Through moving images, I trace how memory, language, and food shape our sense of home, following the shifting contours of cultural identity shaped as much by migration as by longing.
Composed of cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, my recent work Thick & Sweet 甜腻腻 rebuilds personal and collective memory while probing the flattened portrayals of Asian American representation. Across these works, I seek stories that unfold beyond traditional narratives—centering labor, craft, and materiality, and weaving them with personal history to form an emotional ethnography of the immigrant experience.