JUNK
Calligraphy practice paper, ink, gauze, joss, thread, player piano scrolls, surgical glove covers, books, wheat starch
80 x 104 in
2026
JUNK is a hanging assemblage invoking the sails of the Grace Quan, a reconstruction of a Chinese-American fishing junk—vessels operated by immigrants from Southern China in the late 19th century—now moored at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.
“Junk” also names what is thrown away. Here, the sails are composed of my calligraphy practice sheets from the past five years, layered using the traditional art of zhuangbiao rice paper mounting. The work draws from kankonshi (還魂紙), or "soul-returning paper": a recycled paper made in Edo-period Japan from old letters and documents, used to copy Buddhist sutras and believed to hold the soul of the original writer. Through mounting, I layer, tear, attach, and sew together the residues of devotion, until two fragile bodies become one, and multiple material languages fade into each other. Nothing is thrown away. Everything is composted into new life.
Up close, the sail reveals a symphony of scripts: letters I wrote my father during a decade we were separated across oceans, musical codes, my grandmother's poems, pages from books on satellite babies and Chinatown gangs, a myth about the Women's Kingdom from my SF Opera Monkey King performance with Vincent Chong, medical waste collected from clinic. It is all there, held in wheatstarch and gauze, refusing to settle into a single reading. The process is fragmentation and repair, a record of learning to love what can never be fully translated or made legible.
The junk form is further inspired by my great-grandfather's life as a crab fisherman, pirate stories from my ancestral town, the China Camp shrimping villages, and the many mutinies and intimacies that crossed these waters. This vessel becomes a site of passage and repair for borderless bodies, carrying memory, labor, and longing across the free open seas.
