<sub>“All paradises are lost paradises” - Marcel Proust

It’s the end of August. The light is gold and heavy, skating across the ground, buoying the first fallen leaves along the pavement. Shadows languidly unfurl themselves, stretching their toes, and arching their backs through the streets. The landscape is soft and covered in peach fuzz. The last days of summer burn up in tender wisps of smoke. These downy days are clotted with nostalgia - for the summers remembered only by yellowed snapshots, the bright, waxy mornings of back to school, and the shiny new year. The 18th-century painters of the picturesque wove together contemporary landscape design with Greco-Roman figures and crumbling biblical hermitages, creating a vision of an eternal paradise. Painting en plein-air, Impressionists strove to capture a single instant,landscape was a thing in flux, an experience slowly escaping their grasp. Never neutral, place is inscribed with narrative and memory. The ridges and valleys of a landscape are only defined by our meandering, sentimental pilgrimages through them and through time.

— Thea Voyles</sub> 

_{Screening [白芷], 2024
13 x 15 inches
Epoxy resin, wax, Job's tears, Angelica dahurica, American ginseng, acrylic polymer}

<sub>Screenings is a series of resin sculptures casted from reconstructed antique Chinese table screens (桌屏) once used to partition a scholar’s desk, filter light, or shield the act of writing from view. In Chinese, the character 屏 slips between to guard, to filter, to display.

The works linger in this tension, between visibility and protection, image and enclosure, the contemporary screen that emits light and the historical one that absorbs it.

Each screen is formed in translucent resin that fakes the softness and luster of jade, a material long associated with spirituality, value, and permanence. Encased within are medicinal herbs such as Job’s tears, red beans, Angelica dahurica, and American ginseng, ingredients traditionally used to expel dampness (除湿) and maintain balance in the body.  Suspended like fossils in amber or lost files within the cloud, what is preserved becomes both inheritance and imitation.</sub>

_{Screening [Touch], 2024
15 x 16 inches
Epoxy resin, wax, Plexiglas, goji berry, wild jasmine, Euryale ferox, acrylic polymer, acetate}

_{Browser [Other side], 2024
16 x 10 inches
epoxy resin, wax, Plexiglas, wood, licorice, acetate and acrylic polymer}

_{Ink Stone [6 grams] / 砚 [6克] / Pieces
4.5 x 4.5 x 1 inches
Epoxy resin, wax, Job's tears, red beans, ginseng, acrylic polymer}