Faciality is a recorded interview where I ask the other person to sit across the table, look at my face, describe it verbally, while I draw a portrait of myself based on the information I receive. When addressing my face, instead of using “you/your” pronouns, they can only use “she/her''. They cannot say “I’m seeing (a round face etc.)”. The purpose of which is to alienate my face from my perception and to some degree obscure my presence for the other person, as if they’re describing a stranger they saw on the street.

This project treats my face as a semiotic assemblage, an object to be studied and interpreted by another set of eyes. The face is too significant to look away from. When we see a face, we know it must mean something. The face embodies ‘self’ yet its meaning is not self-accessible. We can never directly see our faces, as if they exist solely for others to see.

The drawings are layered. The bottom one was a record/live transcription of the performance besides the video, and the top, more translucent one was a dynamic translation I obtained from the audio while looking at the primary drawings. What the process of this project did was a back and forth, dynamic translation from object to words, words to another object. In this tight chain of loose translation, the drawing is the happening that is transformed into a legible medium by the very experience of a strange encounter. The drawing is a text that reads itself.

Informant 3 (Melanie) said the tiny birthmark near my right eye is “a deserted island, a motherland….it’s singular”. I was reminded of an inaccurate myth that the birthmark is my twin devoured by myself during the time when I was a developing embryo in the mother’s womb. I applied ink to paper then smudged it with my finger (see Drawing #3).




Special thanks to participants of this project

Camera: Noah Namgoong, Allen Mou
Informants: Danyang Guo, Kendrick Castellanos, Melanie Wu
Sound: Melanie Wu, Chelsey Davillier







Deathspell Omega 2023
Collagen sausage casing, melted black licorice candy




Deathspell Omega (detail shot)




Note from me (left) and note from my professor (right)




Deathspell Omega (detail shot)




When we touch something sticky and thick, we feel a sense of intrusion but we’re not sure who is intruding who. This ambiguous feel of vulnerability invites us to experience matters in a more embodied and tactile way. The process of becoming (and becoming with) the other involves a pollution of categories and the established order. The smudging of boundaries can be unsettling as it poses a threat to the self. Contact is necessary for the enactment of viscosity. As the push and pull of molecules on surfaces creates resistance and attraction, beyond being a marker of where one ends and others begin, margin becomes a contact zone where intensity is felt in contradictions. This messy sticky goo asks us to step out of the comfort zone, reconsider the rigidity of classification, and explore the potential for intimacy and connection in the spaces in-between.

I melted a pack of licorice candy in my kitchen. Melting leads to a higher entropy of the matter that changed from solid to half solid half liquid. I filled the sausage casing I got from Amazon with this ‘soup’. The substance then could only move and morph freely within the almost transparent coat. A new order was established. It was a very dangerous object as the casing broke twice in my apartment during the filling. My floor was engulfed by dark slime that kept coming out of the tube—a horrible image. I eventually managed to seal its open ends and carried it to my studio at school. To minimize the risk, I put a note near my studio entrance. My TA Noah was reluctant to step into my studio due to fear of the leaking sausage. Most people who came into my studio expressed the desire to poke at it. The casing was so thin that it became a  permeable boundary. When I touched it the mixed smell of licorice and artificial pork intestine lingered on my finger. The substance inside slowly filtered through the coat to ‘contaminate’ the floor in which it lay. It shrunk and solidified overtime, sucked it and fell back to become a flat bike tire.

Planet -F
2023
Audio, running time: 5:03
Iphone 10, string, tape, drywall


The Parsons building on 13th street shares a basement with planet fitness. Coming from the locked door to the gym’s subfloor, sounds of treadmills and pop music can be heard in the underground space of the institution. During the thesis show, I pre-recorded sounds in the basement and had the audio playing from the drywall through a cut.





Drawing of the basement’s energy field



Image on the left: zoom audio recorder placed in the basement near the door to the gym; Image on the right: Planet Fitness’ promotion accessories in the basement’s tunnel (accessed through the door right to the door in the first image). Photo taken by the artist.