Gently Shout Out!
Cardboard, mixed media on canvas | 105 × 142 cm | 2025
Prisma Estúdio, Lisbon, Portugal
Gently Shout Out! unfolds as a cross-cultural narrative shaped by the shifting experiences of women navigating between Eastern and Western social landscapes. My practice examines the survival dilemmas confronted by women today, while tracing the ideological frictions—and unexpected harmonies—that emerge from encounters between Taiwanese and Portuguese cultures. These layered interactions form a space where identity becomes fluid, continuously negotiated through movement, memory, and daily life.
At the center of this narrative is Precious Bao, my recurring character who operates as a cultural mediator and symbolic witness. Through her presence, I articulate the subtle social entanglements observed in Lisbon’s urban rhythms. The material strategy of the work further extends this dialogue: cardboard pieces cut in the likeness of azulejo tiles are assembled into a textured “old-tile wall,” transforming the canvas into a site where cultural histories overlap. The handmade quality of the tiles echoes both Taiwanese craft sensibilities and the iconic Portuguese visual tradition, allowing the surface itself to become a metaphor for intercultural exchange.
Inspired by conversations with women across Lisbon—immigrants, locals, travelers, and those living in-between—the piece integrates their voices as quiet yet persistent counterpoints. These shared stories weave into the composition like a chorus: intimate, resilient, and collectively resonant. Through this interlacing of material, memory, and dialogue, Gently Shout Out! proposes a cross-cultural narrative that reveals how encounters across borders shape not only identity, but also new forms of emotional and communal belonging.
Gently Shout Out!_ Affection in Lisbon
Cardboard, acrylic paint, sound | 21 × 21 × 21 cm | 2025
Prisma Estúdio, Lisbon, Portugal
Gently Shout Out!_ Affection in Lisbon begins with a poetic narrative of urban emotion, mended traces, and cross-cultural memory. Drawing from the visual language of Portuguese azulejos and the reparative philosophy of kintsugi, the sculpture embodies the beauty found in fracture and reconstruction. Through layers of cardboard, seams, and paint, the work reflects a process of rebuilding the self, allowing cultural symbols from different geographies to intersect and shape a fluid, multifaceted sense of identity.
At the core of the installation is a softly looping strand of Fado—played at a very low volume, gentle yet persistent. As a musical tradition emerging from Portuguese folk life, Fado carries the voices of ordinary people: longing, vulnerability, sorrow, and resilience. In this work, it appears in a restrained and understated form, becoming not only a soft counterpoint to the visual elements but also a metaphor for women’s subtle yet enduring voice within a male-dominated world. This faint but unwavering sound acts as a quiet form of resistance—a tender assertion of presence that vibrates between the intimate and the public.
The sculpture’s fractures, repairs, and textured surfaces evoke the emotional imprints a city leaves upon us—how we are opened, held, and reshaped over time. By weaving together elements from Portuguese and Asian cultural traditions, the work constructs a cross-cultural sensorial terrain where brokenness becomes a point of connection and softness becomes a source of strength. Here, feminine tenderness is not acquiescence, but a resilient expression of agency.
Ultimately, Gently Shout Out!_ Affection in Lisbon presents a cross-cultural narrative in which cultures do not merge seamlessly but resonate through one another, generating new forms of memory, vulnerability, resistance, and belonging—a story carried by the gentle yet powerful voice of women.
Blessing
Mural | 2024
Painted in Andore, Rajasthan, India
Blessing unfolds as a cross-cultural narrative shaped by the encounter between Taiwanese visual language and the spiritual symbolism embedded in Indian tradition. In Rajasthan, the peacock is revered as a sacred bird—an emblem of beauty, protection, and divine grace. By placing the peacock alongside my recurring character Precious Bao, the mural creates a space where cultural motifs from different worlds resonate with one another.
The mural was painted on the home of a large local family of potters. Throughout the creation process, I spent time with them, experiencing their warmth, generosity, and the deep affection that flows naturally within their family. Their openness became essential inspiration for the work, and I invited a talented young girl from the family’s fourth generation to paint alongside me. Together, we created the mural, allowing her to express her natural gift and contributing her unique energy to the work. This collaborative process further strengthened the mural as a gesture of shared care and cross-generational creativity.
With sparkling eyes and fully opened feathers, Precious Bao embodies strength, love, and hope. She stands as a gentle traveler carrying a message across cultures, extending a gesture of goodwill to the clay house and the family who welcomed me. On the opposite wall, a peacock perched near the gate watches over a new generation of birds safely emerging from their eggs. This imagery echoes themes of renewal, protection, and continuity deeply rooted in Indian cultural narratives—and also reflects the enduring vitality of this pottery family.
Through the interplay of these elements, Blessing reflects on how traditions shift and find new meaning through cross-cultural exchange. The work honors the cultural richness of Rajasthan while capturing the sincerity of human connection formed through shared time, creative collaboration, and artistic dialogue. In this shared visual space, cross-cultural reverence becomes a form of gentle care—a blessing I sincerely wished to give to this family, to the young girl discovering her talent, and to the land that embraced us.
Nourish
Mixed media on canvas, installation | 150 × 176 cm | 2024
Hinge Arts Space
Andore,Rajasthan,India
Nourish unfolds as a cross-cultural narrative rooted in embodied experience, shared labor, and reciprocal learning. Created within the rural context of Andore, Rajasthan, the work reflects a dialogue between my artistic vocabulary and the intuitive, place-based gestures of the village children. Entering a community with its own rhythms, values, and visual language, the creative process became a negotiation—an attentive listening to how environment, labor, and cultural memory shape expression.
The daily walk to the village—across farms, muddy paths, and clusters of vegetation—served as both observation and quiet translation. The landscape itself became a cultural and ecological text, offering insights into how place informs ways of knowing. The children’s instinctive use of mud as paint exemplified this knowledge: a material intimately tied to land, memory, and local practice. These spontaneous mud creations were later integrated with my own observations of wildflowers along the path, combining their playful explorations with my careful attention to the natural environment. Together, these elements formed a visual language grounded in the earth of Andore, a dialogue between their freedom of expression and my encounter with the landscape.
Within this cross-cultural exchange, symbolism evolved through interaction. Flowers, long associated with femininity in my own cultural context, encountered the lived reality of women in the village—women whose daily labor mirrors acts of nurturing and sustaining life. The central vase, representing water, became a bridge between our cultural interpretations of life-giving forces, resonating with both my understanding of nourishment and the community’s dependence on water for survival and agriculture.
The mud-made Precious Bao figures carry this hybrid identity further. Initially part of my personal artistic vocabulary, they assumed new meanings when shaped through the stories, laughter, and presence of the children. Each figure becomes a point of connection, embodying traces of both my cultural background and the land-based sensibilities of Andore’s villagers.
Through these layered interactions, Nourish functions as a vessel for cross-cultural narrative. The work is not merely the result of formal artistic decisions, but of shared encounters, reciprocal gestures, and the merging of multiple knowledges. It demonstrates how artistic practice can create spaces where worlds meet, influence one another, and generate forms that neither could have produced alone—a reflection on collaboration, embodied experience, and the subtle ways culture, land, and community interweave.
