Living in the In-Between
A Manifesto for the Artist Who Dwells in Liminal Space
Some of us were not built for arrival.
We belong to the threshold.
The older I get, the more I’ve come to understand that I live in the margins—not as a transitory phase, but as a permanent address. I do not mean this romantically. There’s nothing soft-focus about in-betweenness. It’s not always poetic. Often it’s disorienting. Unnamed. Ungoverned.
But over time, I’ve grown loyal to this tension.
I am the daughter of languages that cannot fully translate each other.
I grew up hearing Cantonese in the kitchen and French murmurs at the table.
Our chopsticks sat beside Laguiole knives. I learned to hold space for both.
Not as a tidy blend, but as a conversation. Sometimes affectionate. Sometimes awkward. Always alive.
When I paint, I am not offering an answer. I am noticing what emerges in the pause.
The way light moves across handmade paper at 3:17 p.m.
The feeling of folding a steamed dumpling, while your son hums a song in a language your grandmother never learned to speak.
In these moments, I’m not trying to make sense.
I’m trying to stay present to what is.
I no longer believe the role of the artist is to define culture. That feels like trying to sculpt mist.
Instead, I see myself as an archivist of sensation. A documentarian of felt time.
Someone who captures what doesn’t usually get noticed—because it’s quiet, subtle, unspectacular.
There’s a rhythm in that kind of noticing.
A kind of sovereignty, too.
My work doesn’t seek to impress, but to attune.
To offer a place to rest the eye—and the self.
A place where the texture of heritage is not background noise, but the main event.
Not flattened into iconography, but treated with the same care you’d give to a family recipe or a handwritten letter.
To live in the in-between is not a dilution. It’s a deepening.
It’s knowing that beauty can be rigorous. That softness is not weakness but attention, finely honed.
That culture is not a box to check, but an atmosphere we carry—visible and invisible, proud and complicated.
It is accepting that not everything fits on a mood board.
Some things must simply be lived.
This is where I choose to make art.
Where the lacquer meets the linen.
Where memory is not nostalgia, but material.
Where home is not a single location, but a layered inheritance.
I paint because there is no other way to hold all of this.
I paint because it lets me pause the scroll, the hustle, the blur.
Because the in-between, when you really stop and look, is never empty.
It’s full of nuance. Full of contradiction. Full of soul.
And that is more than enough.
Would you like this adapted into a spoken-word version for your website’s About page or a slow-scroll video reel for Instagram? I can also turn it into a limited edition artist’s letter for your collectors.