Participated in Artist in Residence Program 2024 “SPINNING SCAPES”

The city is my greatest teacher, revealing how spaces shape our movements, memories, and relationships. This insight led me from rigid architectural design to intuitive work with images, objects, and stories—reimagining installations as soft, ephemeral architecture on intimate scales.

My practice is an intuitive research process, guided by curiosity through observation, interdisciplinary reading, fieldwork, and documentation. It evolved through drawing, collage, and small sculptures that forge connections between places and people. I collect printed matter and everyday artifacts, blending them with my own images to create archives that blur fact and imagination—from urban landscapes to personal memories.

Architectural training gave me command of structure, material, and scale, yet art taught me to embrace uncertainty. My influences include architecture and ikebana. Ikebana deepens my attention to spatial relationships and the subtle dialogue between materials and space.

The theme “SPINNING SCAPES” resonated because it speaks about landscapes as continuously rewritten through movement, narratives, and perception. My practice moves between city-scale structures and personal fragments of memory, so the idea of “spinning” landscapes felt closely aligned with my explorations.

I was drawn to ACAC’s environment—a large experimental gallery surrounded by forests, with a programme that emphasizes production and exchange with local communities. The possibility to test spatial ideas in such a generous space, while learning from Aomori’s climate and narratives, motivated me to step away from familiar places and look back at “place” from another horizon.

The seasonal shifts and climate of Aomori, along with living simply away from home, deeply influenced my work. These elements drew my attention to everyday details and the meaning of home—even as my initial proposal focused on the cuckoo, a bird that does not build nests. The changing light and slow transitions in the forest prompted me to rethink how landscapes can be “read” through temperature, smell, and sound.

A practical challenge was adjusting my working rhythm to a new scale of space and time. The ACAC exhibition hall is much larger than spaces I usually work with, and the residency schedule required constant negotiation between making, researching, and preparing for public presentation. I had to unlearn my habit of over-planning and let the work evolve through on-site experiments, tests, and small failures.

The single day when all four artists were together at ACAC felt like a brief but intense constellation—a shared moment in a temporary home and landscape. Our stays were staggered, so our connection continued mainly through the artworks created and exhibited at ACAC, especially after I left Aomori earlier than the other three. The work I made became a record of my residency, incorporating printed matter and everyday traces collected from my time in Aomori. In a way, it became an empty nest—a subtle, lingering trace of our fleeting encounter.

Conversations with staff, audiences, and community members left a strong impression because they approached the work through concrete references—weather, local histories, and specific routes through the city. These grounded perspectives reminded me that artworks can act as small bridges between different kinds of knowledge, allowing personal stories from Aomori and Hong Kong to quietly overlap. The handwritten letters and folded origami that students sent back for me to add to the work felt especially moving—despite language differences, their simple, sincere gestures made the shared “nest” feel genuinely communal.

The architecture of ACAC, nestled in the landscape yet clearly man-made, stayed with me as a physical experience of walking, descending, and moving between indoor and outdoor thresholds. Together with the surrounding forest and changing sky, the place became a continuous loop between exhibition, daily life, and nature—something I am still digesting after returning home.

This residency deepened my appreciation for working across scales and temporalities—seeing city archives, family, rituals, and natural environments as threads woven into the same fabric. In future projects, I aim to pay closer attention to time, seasonality, and the sensory textures of landscape, moving beyond visual or cartographic representation.

The experience at ACAC was profoundly transformative, offering me quiet reflection on the essentials of living and the diverse practices of artists from around the world. I look forward to further developing my research-based practice, exploring natural materials, nature, rituals, and traditional craft as ways to connect with place, people, and time.