Swallows is a series of printed works that reimagines oral family narratives through the understated poetics of text, layout, and material form. Centered on the lives of women who migrated to southern China’s factories and small businesses in the 1990s, the project adopts the visual language of administrative documents, personnel records, and quiet ephemera to reflect the overlooked architectures of women’s labor, mobility, and desire.

Through sparse, text-driven compositions evoking files, reports, and intimate registries, Swallows assembles a printed mosaic of fragmented histories and everyday rituals. Each story unfolds through the subtle rhythms of typography and structure, gently illuminating the contours of migration, friendship, love, and the bittersweet thresholds of girlhood.

Rather than offering a spectacle of imagery, Swallows uses the tactility and structure of print to trace the emotional contours of migration, resilience, and sisterhood across shifting landscapes of labor and longing.

The Cat Garden Reading Club is a motion-based work that transforms an oral family story into a cinematic tapestry of image, color, and rhythm. Drawing from a personal narrative of clandestine friendship and forbidden books during China’s Cultural Revolution, the piece transcends spoken memory through layered visuals that blur documentary and dream.

Through textured overlays, shifting palettes, and fluid motion, the work conjures the emotional gravity of quiet defiance, intimacy, and historical weight. Visual rhythms evoke the quiet heroism of sharing knowledge under surveillance, the fragility of memory, and the fate of women in turbulent times, unfolding against a backdrop of political upheaval.

Rather than illustrating the story, The Cat Garden Reading Club renders memory itself—fragmented, tender, spectral—inviting viewers into a shared affective space where history reverberates in color and motion.

She Drifted, and the Study of How She Drifted is an interactive digital archive that traces five narratives of female migrant workers in southern China between 1950 and 1990. Through fragmented storytelling, layered interaction, and visual interpretation, the project reimagines the archival form as a drifting, dynamic space—where memory, history, and emotion interlace across shifting timelines.

Instead of linear entries, users navigate the archive through a river of floating keywords—fragments drawn from across all stories. By clicking a word, viewers enter a narrative thread: a short passage opens, with the option to gradually reveal additional layers, including historical context and visual interpretations that embody the missing artifacts of women’s undocumented lives. This non-chronological, user-curated path mirrors the unpredictable journey of migration itself—drifting, gathering, assembling meaning from fragments.

Blending text, image, interactive typography, and motion, the archive honors voices often excluded from official records. It transforms personal oral histories into an affective, participatory experience—inviting viewers not only to witness but to co-construct the narratives, tracing their own connections across the stories. In doing so, She Drifted expands the possibilities of what an archive can hold, feel, and reveal: a living, drifting constellation of women’s strength, tenderness, resistance, and adaptation across time and space.