Drowning, Rising
Behind The Blessing: Ambivalent Care
Space and Ritual
Ghost Marriage
Love Is Fleeting, Love Is EverywhereThe Curly Woof Zine–Meet The Puppies
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Contacts
Behind The Blessing: Ambivalent Care
Images (5 pairs, elder’s perspective above, child’s perspective below)
Cyanotype on Fabric & Installation Outcome
Video (A Casual Chat with My Dear Granny)
Exhibition Summary
Statement
Behind the Blessing: Ambivalent Care explores the emotional complexity of familial love, focusing on how care, expectation and control coexist within East Asian family structures. The work begins from a contradiction: love does exist, yet the behaviours through which love is expressed can become painful, restrictive, or difficult to receive.
The project considers this ambivalence as a mismatch of expectations across generations. Parents and elders are often shaped by older social structures, moral beliefs, domestic rituals and ideas of survival, while the younger generation carries different values, desires and forms of agency. When these positions do not align, care can become pressure, protection can become control, and love can turn into conflict.
Presented as a fabric-based photographic installation, the work uses a large cyanotype print on fabric stitched by my grandmother from leftover fabric she had kept after making quilts for our family, alongside a video of her sewing process. The fabric functions both as an image surface and as a domestic object, referring to intimacy, protection and the emotional weight carried within the home. As a slow, handmade photographic process, cyanotype allows the image to emerge through exposure, waiting, washing and touch, echoing the way family memories are gradually formed, blurred and carried by material. Through image, textile, labour, sound and process, the installation stays with the unresolved condition of family love: tender, heavy, restrictive, and still present.