Anatomy of a Grotto Heaven 洞天解剖圖
2025. Hanging scroll; ink, salt, and Chinese medicine herbs on xuan paper
71 x 25”
Prescription for Longevity 長壽歌
2025. Hanging scroll; ink and Chinese medicine herbs on xuan paper
64”x7’
On view at @ccaplayspace as part of “Matrilineal,” curated by @saucygabby ♥️
Both of my grandmothers were medicine people. Wai-Po was a nurse, and Nai-Nai was the first woman from her village to attend college for medicine–though in her second year, the Cultural Revolution sent her to labor at a salt factory. Unable to finish her education, Grandma worked with barefoot doctors in rural China to provide first-aid, health education and herbal remedies as part of a revolutionary movement to bring health to the masses.
I painted these scrolls at Nai-Nai’s home studio this summer. Growing up, I’d watch her write sutra calligraphy every day as a prayer, to accrue karmic merit, bring compassion to ancestors and all sentient beings. The earthy color of ink comes from traditional Chinese medicine herbs that helped my grandfather alleviate side effects from his cancer therapies. In the long, slow process of tending to life, I am finding my practices in art and medicine intersect materially through the reintegration of matrilineal healing knowledge.
Excited to share more from this new body of work exploring the spiritual, material and aesthetic traditions of Chinese medicine, drawing from research this summer at the China Academy of Art, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and my grandparents’ home.
Jo$$ Reparations
Spirit money, ink, charcoal and cinnabar on xuan paper accordion book, organza, incense, red lacquer chest
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
A history of reparations from 1783 to 2024 paid by the U.S. government, states, cities, religious institutions, universities and corporations, presented as a karmic checkbook and timeline using joss paper—spirit money traditionally burned in Chinese ancestor veneration practices as offering for loved ones in the afterlife.
This installation, in the historic vault of the Bank of America flagship building, is part of a speculative pirate organization using joss as a medium to pay reparations to ghosts. Reparations in the US are often framed as a financial transaction. Through joss, a cultural object linking Taoist ritual, Buddhist karmic balance, and practices of caring for the dead across Asian diasporas, I pay reparations as a spiritual and material act. It is an invitation for all to engage with histories of stolen land, labor, life, and consider our inheritance of unpaid debts as a responsibility in building our collective future. Can we imagine alternative ways of relation beyond racial capitalist logic?
🏴☠️
Today is Qingming and I’m thinking about how to sweep ancestors’ tombs across the ocean. To honor blood and collective kin as the price we pay for living. Join my heist at the vault of @icasanfrancisco this weekend, opening reception tomorrow 5-8pm. Gratitude to all the incredible ICA staff, mentors, friends, and my badass @ccagradfinearts cohort
Documentation by @bryan_d.16@zimo.zhang_
Satellite Baby Sutra
2025
Oil, gold ink, incense, joss, indigo-dyed mulberry paper on canvas
9-panel folding screen, 60 in x 20 ft
A reimagined matrilineal heirloom—based on an 11’ embroidery piece my grandmother made for me as a wedding gift when I was twelve. Her piece featured eighteen women, characters from the 18th-century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, engaged in painting, writing, music, incense and tea ceremony. The piece took her nearly two years to stitch by hand. She gifted it to me after I had moved back to the US, following a decade living under her care.
I made this painting as a devotional act. An attempt to transmit love across distance and realms, in a beloved’s physical absence. To summon, as a future ancestor, through care labor, a world where my chosen family of diasporic femmes, artists and healers can live in communal abundance. These panels feature my family, friends and collaborators: Jasmine Narkita Wiley, Kelsey and Hanna Chen, Roula Sharqawe, Janet Wu, Michelle Wu, Ni Feifei, Edo Ighodaro, Wang Yongmei, Jessica Ainooson, Qusay Omran, Natali and Hanna Barakat, Tess Stewart, and Nibha Akireddy.
Satellite Baby Sutra is a sacred text. Unfolding like an accordion book, it transcribes what I know to.be true; ancient poems and sutras carried across great fire walls and embedded into the present, where burnt archives create new rituals of reverence.
Thank you to all who came to be in community❤️🔥
Details of JUNK, on view at @wattisarts now through our closing reception on 5/15💗🪩🚣🏻♀️
This piece draws from kankonshi (還魂紙), or “soul-returning paper”: a recycled paper made in Edo-period Japan from old letters and documents, used to copy Buddhist sutras and believed to hold the soul of the original writer. Through zhuangbiao rice paper mounting, I layer, tear, attach, and sew together the residues of devotion, until two fragile bodies become one, and multiple material languages fade into each other.
From my second year performing for NEOLUNAR at @fortmasoncenter Firehouse, deep gratitude to @taiwanesenoodles@itsyangsheng for the beautiful community you brought together and photos by @andy_antezanaa and @gorbira ❤️🔥
For a few years I’ve been studying nüshu, the matrilineal writing system created by women in Jiangyong, China, with flowy strokes resembling flames. I think this script helps me work through knots in my maternal lineage. This poem, Prayer to the Phoenix Goddess, invokes the phoenix descending, dragons turning in water, incense rising, and a young woman stepping forward. Words once hidden are now illuminated, like the Fire Horse itself, finally free.
Found a shrimp junk named Grace Quan at the SF Maritime Historic Park which I took as a sign from the ancestors that I had to make it for my MFA thesis show⛵️opening tomorrow, May 1 @wattisarts !
Catch my cohort mogging at the reception May 15, 5-8pm. Until then the gallery is open Wednesday-Saturdays 12-6pm, dm me if you’d like to come for a walkthrough💗💗
Making this piece connected so many threads for me: an assemblage of my calligraphy practice papers from the last 5 years, centering my grandmother’s ritual, the practice itself (hours, days, months, years, generations) instead of the product. Nothing is discarded. Everything is composted into new life.
Also inspired by my great-grandfather’s life as a crab fisherman, pirate stories from our town, China Camp shrimping villages, many mutinies and intimacies across oceans. Let’s sail free into the borderless open seas🦀🐚❤️🔥
JUNK
Mulberry paper, ink, gauze, joss, thread, player piano scrolls, surgical glove covers, books, wheat starch
80” x 104”
𝒲𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝒹𝑜𝑒𝓈 𝒾𝓉 𝒽𝓊𝓇𝓉?
Ink, iodine, anti-inflammatory herbs on xuan paper mounted on silk
6 ft x 8.25 in
I keep returning to this poem by Franny Choi because the dying is ceaseless and the powerful have no shame. Searching for medicine for our inflamed world
In a recent conversation with @davidhuffmanstudio about what moves us in a painting, we arrived at vital signs: when it feels alive. As I finish preclinical studies this year, it became clear that all my practices are acts of tending to life. Painting, healing, praying. Holding someone’s hand, listening to their heart, bearing witness to pain, breath, birth, death— again, again. I paint because it returns me to feeling, presence, aliveness. It helps me remember how sacred the art of medicine is. Sutures, sutras, stains. Bleeds, letters, pulses. Materials, gestures, and rituals of care become mark-making. It is metabolism, and it is freeing me in ways I am only beginning to understand.
𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑜 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓂𝑜𝓊𝓉𝒽 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓌𝑜𝓊𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝑒𝓃𝓉𝓇𝓎 𝒾𝓈 𝓇𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓈𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒷𝒶𝒸𝓀
Ink, iodine, safflower and gardenia fruit on xuan paper mounted on silk
10 ft x 26.75 in
Final week to see the Barclay Simpson MFA exhibition at CCA Novack gallery, closing reception Wednesday 5-6:30pm💛
𝒶 𝒹𝓇𝒾𝓅, 𝒹𝓇𝒾𝓅 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝒶𝓂𝑒 𝒶 𝒻𝓁𝑜𝑜𝒹
Ink, iodine, safflower and gardenia fruit on xuan paper mounted on silk
70 x 19.25”
On view at CCA Novack gallery until 3/18 as part of the Barclay Simpson awards exhibition
𝕯𝖊𝖈𝖔𝖈𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓
My grandfather’s herbal medicine on xuan paper accordion, 4x11”
Last summer, my 爷爷 began making a daily herbal decoction to ease the side effects of his chemotherapy medications, which caused kidney toxicity, fevers and rashes. This book records his formula of 20+ anti-inflammatory herbs, including Curcuma wenyujin and Centella asiatica, often used in TCM to support cancer treatment.
A decoction extracts the essence of things. In studying and painting with these herbs in the style of Li Shizhen’s Materia Medica, I began to see deeper connections between Chinese medicine and art, ancient/contemporary sciences, Eastern/Western knowledge systems that are not competing but complementary. While my medical training values certainty, it also confronts vast unknowns—spaces long held by ancestral, indigenous traditions passed down through generations.
This work invites more plural ways of seeing: bodies, histories, and paths to healing that emerge when we remain open.
On view at CCA Novack gallery until 3/18💛
𝓉𝒶𝓀𝑒 𝒶 𝒹𝑒𝑒𝓅 𝒷𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓉𝒽 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒽𝑜𝓁𝒹 𝒾𝓉 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓂𝑒
Ink on xuan paper mounted on silk
52 x 13.25 in
A scroll in my constellation at the Barclay Simpson MFA awards exhibition on view now at Novack gallery @ccaexhibitions . Come see the show and hang at the reception 5-7pm on March 18!! Grateful to share space with dear @jasminenarkita@alfredozapatadejesus@saucygabby ❤️🔥 #painting #ink #artist #sf
