Nomadic Love(2025, 2026)
1. 我爱你, 사랑해, 愛してる
2025.11.27 About 7:10 a.m.
3 videos(digitalized) 9s/4s/2s, color, sound
我爱你
사랑해요
あいしてる
1. Love Language
On a Thursday morning, I said “I love you” in three different languages.
But I realized that the video in my mother tongue was actually the longest (9 seconds). It seemed that, before I spoke, I hesitated for quite a while. The Korean clip was the second longest (4 seconds). After many years of study, the language has become much more familiar to me—still not as natural as my mother tongue, yet somehow less embarrassing. But the Japanese clip was the shortest (2 seconds), and it ended the most decisively. When I said “I love you” in Japanese, I sounded the most confident. Perhaps this was because, while filming in Japanese, I wasn’t really thinking about love itself, but rather about how to pronounce the words correctly.
It seems easier for me to say “I love you,” “I like you,” or “I hate you” in a foreign language. But as a language becomes more familiar, the distance between emotion and words grows smaller which makes me feel more embarrassed.
I recorded three times and finally chose the very first test take. Perhaps that unprepared, unrehearsed, hazy, and clumsy state was the most embarrassing—and precisely for that reason, it deserved to be presented.
2. Love Language
Whether in one’s mother tongue or a foreign language, whether local or foreign, everyone has their own language of love. And the phrase “I love you” inevitably carries different meanings for each person—because we all grow up in different families and experience different forms of love.
What kind of love can I offer to others? And what kind of love language can I speak? And what kind of love and love language, do I hope to receive? At the very least, I don’t want to prove my love endlessly, nor pretend that I don’t love. I imagine a kind of love that exists in dynamic balance.
Can I understand and accept the anxiety, wounds, and anger hidden behind another person’s love language? Can I avoid blaming their anxiety, wounds, and anger on myself?
And for myself—can I let go of past anxieties, doubts, and anger, remain patient, and learn to listen to another person’s love language?
(If love, as people say, is patient and kind.)
2. I Love You for 840 Times
2026
7min 38s
Video(digitalized), color, sound
Click to watch the full video
I repeatedly write “我爱你(I love you)” on my own palms in my mother language(Chinese) until I could no longer bear the pain and exhaustion. I record the entire process in which “I love you” appears and disappears.
Writing sweet words—or secret words—on the palm is one of the small, intimate gestures between people in everyday life. While the palm is a site that is at once private and fragile, yet with elasticity and resilience, becomes a place where emotion is written, revealed, and erased.
This work is also rooted in my personal experience. Consciously or unconsciously, I repeatedly enter long-distance and cross-cultural relationships, as if practicing a form of nomadic love. When love occurs, I choose to give my all; yet after truly letting go, I am also surprised by the detachment of my own. But at the end of the day, I still choose to try to preserve a certain courage to love — both the courage to love, and the courage to be loved.
Love repeatedly emerges and disappears, while the palm that gives or receives love remains.
I will love you for 840 times. I will love for 840 times.
On a Thursday morning, I said “I love you” in three different languages.
But I realized that the video in my mother tongue was actually the longest (9 seconds). It seemed that, before I spoke, I hesitated for quite a while. The Korean clip was the second longest (4 seconds). After many years of study, the language has become much more familiar to me—still not as natural as my mother tongue, yet somehow less embarrassing. But the Japanese clip was the shortest (2 seconds), and it ended the most decisively. When I said “I love you” in Japanese, I sounded the most confident. Perhaps this was because, while filming in Japanese, I wasn’t really thinking about love itself, but rather about how to pronounce the words correctly.
It seems easier for me to say “I love you,” “I like you,” or “I hate you” in a foreign language. But as a language becomes more familiar, the distance between emotion and words grows smaller which makes me feel more embarrassed.
I recorded three times and finally chose the very first test take. Perhaps that unprepared, unrehearsed, hazy, and clumsy state was the most embarrassing—and precisely for that reason, it deserved to be presented.
2. Love Language
Whether in one’s mother tongue or a foreign language, whether local or foreign, everyone has their own language of love. And the phrase “I love you” inevitably carries different meanings for each person—because we all grow up in different families and experience different forms of love.
What kind of love can I offer to others? And what kind of love language can I speak? And what kind of love and love language, do I hope to receive? At the very least, I don’t want to prove my love endlessly, nor pretend that I don’t love. I imagine a kind of love that exists in dynamic balance.
Can I understand and accept the anxiety, wounds, and anger hidden behind another person’s love language? Can I avoid blaming their anxiety, wounds, and anger on myself?
And for myself—can I let go of past anxieties, doubts, and anger, remain patient, and learn to listen to another person’s love language?
(If love, as people say, is patient and kind.)
2. I Love You for 840 Times
I Love for 840 Times
2026
7min 38s
Video(digitalized), color, sound
I repeatedly write “我爱你(I love you)” on my own palms in my mother language(Chinese) until I could no longer bear the pain and exhaustion. I record the entire process in which “I love you” appears and disappears.
Writing sweet words—or secret words—on the palm is one of the small, intimate gestures between people in everyday life. While the palm is a site that is at once private and fragile, yet with elasticity and resilience, becomes a place where emotion is written, revealed, and erased.
This work is also rooted in my personal experience. Consciously or unconsciously, I repeatedly enter long-distance and cross-cultural relationships, as if practicing a form of nomadic love. When love occurs, I choose to give my all; yet after truly letting go, I am also surprised by the detachment of my own. But at the end of the day, I still choose to try to preserve a certain courage to love — both the courage to love, and the courage to be loved.
Love repeatedly emerges and disappears, while the palm that gives or receives love remains.
I will love you for 840 times. I will love for 840 times.
Failed File(2025)
Archive in file box
320mm*250mm*30mm
2025.05~2025.09~2025.11
- It was a project I began in May and titled “Froth of the Day,” but in the end it was a failed work. I washed my hair every day with the old shampoo my maternal grandmother frequently used while she was alive, growing my hair until the shampoo was finished, and then cutting it again. To make an everyday ritual. It feels as though the everyday reveals her existence through her absence. After my grandmother passed away, I never once encountered that scent again anywhere. After a long time, I bought a bottle, and the moment I opened the cap, the scent came back to me. Sometimes I miss her; sometimes I want to be comforted; sometimes I want to experience my grandmother’s everyday life. And when someone smells that scent and becomes curious, asking me about it, I want to share my vulnerable, private project with them. I think anyone who comes close enough to ask is someone I can tell.
- This work began due to various motives, and it was interrupted and failed due to various motives. When I tried sorting through the materials again for the project, it was confusing—like a jumble of sleep talk. Poorly organized plans, diagrams repeatedly revised as I tried to anticipate the result, the cover I made when I wanted to bind it as a book (a photo of the back of my head), a gentle diary, the dream where my grandmother appeared and I woke up crying, conversations with ChatGPT, small secrets written in a memo app, a photo of me cutting my hair at home around September. Even the introduction to the project can only remain in fragments.
- One of the reasons I couldn’t properly finish the work is perhaps the obsession and guilt I feel toward nature. I keep having to rethink everyday life, rituals, and the work itself. The moment I recognize it as a work, everyday life goes up onto a stage—it becomes a kind of performance, purpose, intention. And once I am conscious of it, every gesture becomes inevitably unnatural and altered. I feel sorry toward my grandmother. Yet I believe she would still love and forgive me.
- But unexpectedly, performance, intention, and practice can also become natural everyday life at some point. Sometimes, when I walk home alone in the evening, there comes a moment when I suddenly remember that I used that shampoo in the morning—realizing that I am, in fact, still in the middle of the project.
Foldable Life(2025）
Digital Photography and Archive
As another move approaches, I find that lightweight clothes make up almost my entire wardrobe. Some garments—T-shirts, for example—naturally take on a dual role, functioning both as summer wear and as sleepwear.
This has led me to reconsider my relationship with these clothes. Amid years of frequent moves and relocation, perhaps I have consciously or unconsciously prefer garments that are easy to pack and adaptable to different situations. But I also wonder whether this long-term reliance on such clothing has, in turn, made it more difficult for me to truly settle down—leaving me to unconsciously assume, or even anticipate, the next unexpected move.
This series was photographed in the entranceway of the small one-room I rented while studying in South Korea. The clothes are hung on an extendable drying rod left behind by the previous tenant, who was also an international student.
*I also seem to have an obsession with Mickey Mouse and striped clothing.
This has led me to reconsider my relationship with these clothes. Amid years of frequent moves and relocation, perhaps I have consciously or unconsciously prefer garments that are easy to pack and adaptable to different situations. But I also wonder whether this long-term reliance on such clothing has, in turn, made it more difficult for me to truly settle down—leaving me to unconsciously assume, or even anticipate, the next unexpected move.
This series was photographed in the entranceway of the small one-room I rented while studying in South Korea. The clothes are hung on an extendable drying rod left behind by the previous tenant, who was also an international student.
*I also seem to have an obsession with Mickey Mouse and striped clothing.
16MB:Deliberate Imperfection(2024)
-Digital photography, digital archive, memory card
-640px*480px, About 60p
-2024.04
2024/04/14
2024/04/21
In this project, I used an old digital camera and a 16MB memory card that I happened to find. I documented two “imperfect” days—the day after a breakup, and a rainy day I have always disliked—recording my ordinary, and perhaps somewhat mundane, walks.
On these imperfect days, I tried to overcome things simply by reaching the smallest unit of completion. In a way, I might even have wanted to overcome the very urge to “overcome.” By practicing acceptance and surrender to imperfection, I was reminded that the mere completion of an ordinary day is, in itself, something significant.
During this process, I kept shooting until the battery died or the 16MB card was full. To avoid making the work appear artificially “perfect,” I chose not to delete photos I didn’t like or edit them in any way.
Even when reviewing and organizing the work on my laptop, I noticed that each image was only about a few tens or a few hundreds of kb in size. By today’s standards, the image quality would be considered low, yet it felt unexpectedly sufficient to me. Within this sense of lack, limitation, and absence, I experienced an indescribable kind of freedom.
However, as the gaps in the file numbering of the photos reveal, I unconsciously still selected the ones that “looked better” during the final curation process. This contradicts the original intention of the work and could be seen as a failure—a breaking of the rules I initially set. Yet I began to wonder whether I could embrace this failure as well: the instinct for control, the contradictions it produces, and even a harmless, moderate sense of vanity.
Also, ever since I developed this shooting plan, my camera has been drawn almost instinctively toward subjects tinged with melancholy. Our exercise of the power to narrate archives—through selection, omission, and editing—is equally inescapable in the photo albums of our everyday lives. At the same time, this deliberate embrace of melancholy has paradoxically allowed me to step outside it, if only for a brief moment.
Phantom Hometown(2024/2025)
The hometown is the phantom of mine, as I am the phantom of hometown.In this work, I record my hometown — an aging mining town during the Spring Festival. I intentionally had them printed on regular photo paper and then returned them to my childhood family photo album.
Like any old family album, its material vulnerability is unavoidable. Yet the gestures while flipping and traces left by repeated viewing feel even more valuable. I imagine each viewer as my family member or intimate friend, whose silent marks of presence emerge through the close, tactile act of album flipping.
-97mm*147mm, 36 pages
-Digital photography print and collage
-Old family album; Headshot(7 years old); Boarding pass
-2024.02/2025
-Digital photography print and collage
-Old family album; Headshot(7 years old); Boarding pass
-2024.02/2025
Finding Fu(2024)
Digital Photography Archive, 37p
2024.02
In China, the character "Fu(福)" is the skin of culture and memory that peels off, regenerates, and overlaps every year.
I recorded the "Fu" on the door of warehouse in my hometown (where my family has been lived since 1987), imagining the countless possibilities of families.
I recorded the "Fu" on the door of warehouse in my hometown (where my family has been lived since 1987), imagining the countless possibilities of families.