Breathing
2026
153 x 305cm (60 x 120”)
Color pastel on sheer fabric
It has been two years since I started methods on how to use frottage. First as material experiments on A4 paper for Times Art Museum in Guangzhou (2024), video transcription at Mercer Union (2026), and now as a lyrical stand-alone drawings. The new drawings are monumental in size and experiment with process and form by ‘pulling’ letters as I impress them on the tombstone and controlling density or vastness based on the proximity and orientation of letters.
This drawing laboriously repeats the phrase “Breathing, A Whole Reef is Constructed”.
The words ‘Breathing’ span the monumental height of the artwork as the words stretch and twist like air bubbles ascending from the depths of the ocean. While the base of the drawing is densely stacked like a sea bed occupied by coral reefs with the phrase “A Whole Reef is Constructed”.
The frottage drawing was impressed at Vietnamese Cemetery in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia. It expands my ongoing work, reimagining the drowned as reincarnated corals that exist on the same sea bed where people had once sunken to. These corals are now studied by marine biologists at UMT and are commercially farmed by Yayasan to fill aquariums across the globe.
It is important to me that the process physically embodies the process of migration. The fabric is cut to size and folded to fit my backpack, allowing me to reach and work at the remote cemetery in KT. The drawings are far too precious to place in checked luggage, so that stay with me at all times in a backpack or a carry-on suitcase (which is also a pain when relying on regional planes in Malaysia). The folds and wrinkles are markers of its production and movement between Malaysia, Vietnam, and Canada. This movement mirrors the same trajectory as many of the diaspora.
With this process, and that of my recent film making, I think about the studio as a mobile and itinerant site. Taking place in a graveyard, an island, a hotel room, an aquarium filtration room. Material, process and form is discovered through field research and through social relationships. It makes it difficult to distill in a normative studio visit, so I started to document the frottage process as an articulation of this expanded studio.
