Love Letter and Affirmation are both deeply personal reflections on my complex relationships with my mixed identity. Love Letter features words from Joan Hillery’s That Great British Documentary as a challenge to the ways in which British nationalist identity is constructed and displayed, and the violence, injustice and exploitation underlying our cultural understandings of ‘Britishness’. Where Love Letter is framed as an outward expression of anger and defiance, Affirmation is a more intimate work - a prayer, affirmation or letter to a younger self inviting pride and joy in as a counter to the shame and guilt felt growing up in Britain with a mixed identity. 

Displayed in the exhibitions and you would have to believe it (Copeland Gallery, London) and Discomfort in Residence (Indra Gallery, London), I drew on the shows’ themes of knowledge, power, and perception to develop installations of these works as personal, partial and tangled archives. Tracing through research and conversation, this installation navigates the complex ways in which my multiple identities intersect, shift and clash. As well as a focus on interrogating constructions of British identity in the face of legacies of colonialism and the ongoing complicity and guilt in global conflict, I also explore my relationship with 'Chineseness' and conceptions of this identity as 'pure', monolithic, and othered.