JUNK
Calligraphy practice paper, ink, gauze, joss, thread, player piano scrolls, surgical glove covers, books, wheat starch
80in x 104 in
2026
Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition, CCA Wattis Institute
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 five years of calligraphy practice sheets layered using the traditional art of mounting rice paper. Drawing from kankonshi—recycled sutra papers believed to hold the soul of the writer—these fragments hold the residue of daily devotion learned from my grandmother. To tear and reassemble is not destruction but a form of care: the past is neither preserved intact nor discarded, but metabolized. Practice becomes material, repetition becomes structure. Tracing childhood migration between the US and Yueqing, my ancestral fishing town, the vessel becomes a site of passage and repair. Its surfaces refuse full legibility, holding what cannot be translated. This boat sails for borderless bodies, carrying memory, labor, and longing across irreconcilable distances.
