Working mainly in drawing, performance, and video, my practice focuses on an integrated inquiry into how abstract notions of identity and order materialize in the speaking body. Adopting a Feminist psychoanalytic perspective, I consider the boundary between self and other, subject and object not as a barrier but as a contact zone where intensity is sighted and sited on the edge. If the body is a measure of the world, like language, the relearning and refashioning of order require a destabilization of ‘self’. My recent project Stranger Within is a recorded interview where I ask three informants to take turns to sit across the table, look at my face, describe it verbally while I draw portraits of myself based on their descriptions. The process treats my face as a semiotic assemblage whose meaning is not essentially accessible (we can’t see our faces directly), an uncanny object to be interpreted by another set of eyes. In this chain of translation from the object to words to another object, the drawing is the happening that is transformed into a legible medium by the very experience of a strange encounter—it’s a text that reads itself. One of the informants said that the birthmark near my right eye is “a deserted island, a motherland”. 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.