I work with small canvases and large tools so that dust motes, erased marks, smudges, and noise become exaggerated when digitally translated. Part of my interest in animation as an expressive medium is my fascination with texture and grain, which are emphasized in motion and repetition. Compositionally, I employ a flat, forced perspective, taking influence from puppetry and theatrical staging. Accumulated, these visual elements become densely-layered worlds and, as tableaus, convey the effect of compressed time.
My characters echo different parts of my own personality and the personalities of people I love (or love to hate)—I take inspiration from their hair, clothing, accessories, body language, and speech. They haunt worlds that personify their emotional states, and their private desires conflict with their public ones. I’m interested in stories about characters who hold untenable hypocrisies, who are not self-aware, and who are ultimately very lonely. I place them in moments of mundane and existential absurdity, magnifying their internal conflicts. As in gothic narratives, my settings are atmospheric and expressionistic but rooted in close observation of the world around me. In my daily life, I often draw in sketchbooks, and I bring what I see and experience into my films. These grounded details lend intimacy and tangibility to uncanny dreamscapes, and their specificity allows me to employ them as tools for social satire.
The systems I am most interested in satirizing are the spaces I’m invited into but feel conflicted about. As my position in this world evolves, so do these spaces, but my work has previously interrogated Asian-American conservatism, technospirituality, suburban homogeneity, parasociality, misogyny, and body dysmorphia. These issues reflect my own hypocrisies. I am specifically interested in exploring how, as a cultural consumer, I am both drawn to and repelled by technological potential. The false, sparkling promise of the internet is one of inorganic mass kinship at the expense of individual expression and the natural world. Yet I keep returning.
My work ultimately emphasizes the experience of aliveness: psychological instability, animism, subjective time, and a perpetual hum or vibration around all things. These qualities exist most strongly at the threshold between wakefulness and sleep, which is where my imagination is most fruitful and where truth is most accessible.