Photograph: Garry Trinh
As the child of Cantonese migrants born in the shadow of the White Australia Policy, my practice is informed by my lived experience as a queer person of colour, and an enduring curiosity about the invisible social, cultural, and political forces that shape our lives. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s seminal essay Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power, a research trip to the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, and the work of feminist and queer activists, I am interested in histories of collective resistance, community empowerment, and queer joy as practices of survival and transformation.
Working across sculpture and installation, I explore how structures of oppression might be reimagined as sites of healing and political agency. My artistic practice approaches dominance and submission as gestures of care and consent, inviting the viewer into a ritual space of devotion where queer power exchange becomes a language of intimacy.
My artworks oscillate between control and release, restraint and excess. I contrast the refined elegance of Chinese material traditions, including bronze, porcelain, silk, ink, and glass, with the coded language of queer aesthetics and kink culture, incorporating leather, rubber, chains, deconstructed bedsheets, jock straps, and clothing. My relationship to materials is disciplined and deeply physical, involving ordering, containment, and control. The act of making becomes a dynamic negotiation between intention and resistance: how I want a material to behave, and how its refusal generates meaning.
The droplet is a recurring motif in my work. It may evoke tears, sweat, saliva, bodily fluids, an overflow of emotion, or a queer force that exceeds the boundaries of the body. The circle is another recurring form, which functions as a portal or aperture, inviting viewers to look within or beyond. Through these symbols, I construct speculative worlds shaped by queer knowledge, hope, and imagination. Personal mythologies become a way of visioning new possibilities, inviting audiences into those worlds alongside me. Through radical vulnerability and the collapse of private and public realms, personal experience becomes collective experience. In this space, queer joy emerges as a form of community resistance.
Encountering my work often produces a tension between beauty and disquiet: a minimal, controlled visual field charged with emotional and symbolic intensity. I use a restricted colour palette and atmosphere that encourage close attention to form. Through this interplay, I have developed a visual vocabulary that balances austerity with sensuality. As with my materials, revelation emerges through a continual negotiation between control and resistance. I invite audiences to consider how light and shadow can be understood as interconnected forces within a process of transformation. At the heart of my practice is a belief in the power of art to transform the way we see ourselves and others.