Quarantine Portrait No. 2 “没有家园,我是谁 / without homeland, who am I?” Acrylic on Arches Watercolor paper 18x24" 🥬🏮 Sometimes I’ll dream & I’ll find myself in Jiangxi. There lies the biggest water lily field in the entire world. But growing up on the other side of the Pacific, I never had these memories. If you ask me of my childhood all I can tell you of is snow. Snow so expansive I was named after it. I spent my early childhood on the territory of the Plains Cree and Blackfoot nations. How do diasporic people build home overseas while acknowledging that we are a guest on indigenous land that was stolen? After 28 years of being here, I long to know the lands of my ancestors. Not the smog-filled industrialized face of China, but the land itself. It’s skin carved by are rivers and rice paddies and mountains. And I want to know what it’s like to swim inside of them. I come from the porcelain capital of the world. Porcelain carved by hand and made shining and strong by fire. My parents spoke an ancient dialect that I do not know how to speak. There are words in mandarin that are untranslatable into English’s 26 letter limitations. There is galaxies of subtext beneath the surface of each phrase that you’d only understand if you were there and looking into the eyes of another. I used to wish I was anything but Southern Chinese. But my blood is the distance between home & land and the only way to cross it is to love the tropical humid air that made me. Is to breathe it back in and remember the scent, even from this side of the Pacific. Is to build a home inside this flesh in the middle of a global pandemic that the U.S. blames your people for creating. Is to create a bi-lingual, trans-continental artistic practice and turn the very act of filmmaking into a border being broken open. A border that was never meant to exist in the first place. 🎏🌊 #selfportrait #artistsoninstagram #portraitpainting