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.