The Ten Thousand Things (July 2026)

“When the ten thousand things are seen in their unity, we return to the beginning and remain where we have always been.”

My mother chose this line by Ts’ên Shên for her funeral card. In this poem she found comfort in the thought that, at the end of her life, she would experience the interconnectedness of everything around her: of things, of the living and the dead, of the past and the present.

Shortly before she died, we spoke about the meaning of home. She told me that because she had moved so often throughout her life, it was no longer places that had become her home, but her belongings. She felt that her own life, and the lives of the people she loved, were preserved within them. That is why she rarely threw anything away.

I work with what we inherit. From objects to character traits and patterns, from memories to blind spots. With what we want to hold on to, and with what holds on to us, even when we wish it wouldn’t.

Together, they form the ten thousand things, which I explore by creating new images of them. Again and again, until I have seen everything.

What interests me most is not the inherited objects, memories, or patterns themselves, but the struggle and the inability they reveal: the struggle to hold on to what we fear losing, and to free ourselves from what we long to leave behind.

The Ten Thousand Things is an ongoing work in progress, without chronology or hierarchy, in which every object and image carries its own meaning, while each new constellation allows it to tell a different story.

For the constellation presented during my Graduation Show, I brought together the following four works.

Family Album I–IV ↗︎
Family Album I (150 × 200 cm)
Family Album II, III & IV (70 × 100 cm)
Archival family photographs from 1983, digitally manipulated, enlarged, printed on PVC canvas, and stretched over LED light boxes.

Nostos I & II ↗︎
Nostos I (250 × 432 cm)
Nostos II (238 × 335 cm)
Sculptures shaped with my own body from enlarged photographic prints of rooms in the house where I grew up. Printed on 60 gsm paper and mounted on 300 μm aluminium.

Alteration I ↗︎
Inherited kimono and masking tape.
97 × 80 × 40 cm.

The Way We Were ↗︎
Our Chair I
Our Chair II
Our Table
Furniture sculpted from paper pulp made from 50 m² of painted memories, held together with masking tape.