Created as Artist in Residence with Allowing Many Forms, Fall 2022.
This book contains traces, reconstructed memories, multi-directional storytelling, searching, and unraveling sourced from archival maps, film photographs, drawings, engravings, and photos from my phone. These sites were first inscribed into land by US white settler colonial infrastructures, exploiting Chinese bodies to dispossess Indigenous peoples and lands and to suppress Black resistance and liberation: the California Trail (established 1811–1840), the First Transcontinental Railroad (constructed 1862–1869), and Interstate 80 (constructed 1956–1986). Their sequence was traced again in 1988 by recently arrived Chinese students, my parents in the Beautiful Country, and in 2022, by me, searching. In nearly every case of Chinese diaspora along these inscriptions, Chinatown is set on fire and burned to the ground. In nearly every case of Chinatown burned to the ground, I search for and unravel traces of us in the insurance maps they drew in case of fire.
Halves on cutting board, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 18 inches, 2022
A departmental thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design . Advised by Andrew Atwood and Neyran Turan.
This thesis is an architectural fever dream about the San Francisco Bay Area. Beginning with the premise that current ideas of Home and Elsewhere are no longer useful, the project wonders how disciplinary tools of architecture can be used to shape new stories about where we are. The project thus situates itself both in literal spaces of Elsewhere and Home (landfills, houses, wilderness, wastelands, campuses, neighborhoods) and in their culturally constructed space (value-embedded narratives that determine whether something belongs, and to whom). Since we construct both narratives through principles of exclusion, Elsewhere is closer to Home than we say. These hybrid spaces—domestic and industrial, urban and hinterland, natural and built—are investigated as found conditions of the Anthropocene and potential sites for new understandings of Place. At stake, if we care to have one, is our disciplinary relevance in choosing how we build.
The White Representation project (established 2020) is an open-source collection of entourage to assist in the accurate portrayal of whiteness in architectural production. The images are intended for educational use only and are not licensed for commercial use of any kind.
University of California, Berkeley
Master of Architecture
Fall 2018: ARCH203 Integrated Design Studio
Instructor: D. Spiegel
In which disrupted continuities and continuous disruption are proposed as a formal strategy for organizing playing and learning. A new 21,000 square foot childcare and child development center for the City College of San Francisco engages multiple adjacencies, from the residential fabric of Balboa Park to the sprawling campus. The timber hybrid structural system (cross-laminated timber panels as well as heavy timber columns and beams) facilitates formal moves and resulting geometries, which create nooks and gaps for flexible use as well as for building performance.
Project completed for the 45 Library.
The 45th president is only symptomatic of a nation built by white supremacy, settler colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and US imperialism. No new library is necessary to help us understand this moment, as the library exists already in white spaces we can read as texts: carceral spaces filled with stolen people; commodified monoculture and resource extraction on stolen land; museums of stolen objects and ideas; pipelines and borderwalls allowing capital to move but not communities; statehouses, built through the stolen labor and knowledge of enslaved people; militarized police violence as environmental design.
These library stacks (architecture, urban design, and infrastructure) are both produced by and reproduce whiteness as an intentional racial formation and as biopolitical tools of the colonizer state. They are continuous with each other as a system, depend on individuals' complicity with white supremacy to uphold them, and are never neutral. The white behaviors and white spaces in this image are but a few examples of the harm that white supremacy inflicts upon all of us, including those who are themselves racialized as white.
Whiteness is not neutral, white architectural space is not neutral, and for those who read this nation every day in its white constructions, this moment was already written in stone, concrete, and steel.
THE END OF YOU is an experiential space which ran from February 7, 2020 to March 1, 2020 at the Gray Area / Grand Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District.
The exhibition was the culmination of Gray Area's Experiential Space Research Lab, a collaboration between 11 artists: Brenda (Bz) Zhang, Celeste Martore, Jonathon Keats, Kelly Skye, Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, Orestis Herodotou, Rena Tom, Romie Littrell, Stephanie Andrews, Stephen Standridge, Yulia Pinkusevich.
THIS WILL BE THE END OF YOU... AND THE BEGINNING OF US.
Sometimes you paint because
You want them to live forever
Sometimes because
You want them forever
Sometimes
You want to live forever
Sometimes because
You want to
(project initiated in june 2017 at sweet things farm, nyc)
In which architectural representation is used to make visible the violence of freeway infrastructure at a human scale and to redefine its found conditions for potential spaces of assembly in Oakland, California. By siting itself where freeways meet the ground at the 980-580 interchange in North and West Oakland, the project applies conventions of architectural representation to reveal entire city blocks of poché.
In which the building failure of the Orfalea Family Center for Childhood Development & Family Studies at the City College of San Francisco is analyzed as a case study in both structural and experiential qualities. Using the conventions of construction documentation, the drawing applies both technical rigor and tongue-in-cheek annotation speculating on how the building came to be in its current state of decay.
In which the future of the architectural section is imagined in a series of final drawings of a case study building. Inspired by 3D modeling programs in the medical field using CAT and MRI scans, the drawing imagines a near-future sectional drawing of architecture, in which sectional cuts are generated through freehanded curves drawn within software to isolate fragments of models for closer examination.
Installation accompanying visual and sound performance with Jess Best for Claire's Continuum.
In collaboration with Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye for SPACE INDUSTRIES.
At a time in United States history where—once again—the question of borders and citizenship take center stage, American Strangers / Stranger Americans examines who we count as strangers and as familiars, as aliens and citizens. These are questions about who belongs and who does not. Built environment designers, in particular, are uniquely positioned to ask questions about home, as we participate not only in the social construction of ideas about home, but in the physical constructions of their sites. Published in Ground Up Journal, Issue 8 (2019).
As architectural designers, we strive to represent spaces that interest us and fail to represent those that do not. These are stories we've told and tell ourselves, and that perhaps we ought to tell differently. This project attempts using architecture to tell other stories of seemingly familiar places, employing uniquely architectural tools of representation (for example, section cuts, break lines, orthographic projection, material coding, cross referencing, scale) in three drawings to make visible qualities, limits, and potentials of what we consider to be familiar space.
By encountering these places as as-builts with found conditions to be surveyed and verified in field, the project hones in on qualities of place that can be recorded through architectural tools but often are overlooked in conventional academic and professional practice. Just as as-builts and surveys conventionally inform the transition between old and new constructions, the intention of this project is to reveal possible transitions between old and new ideas of place.
Moving up in in scale, these three drawings depict the on-ramp to I-580 in West Oakland, where the author lives; the Stones Oil Rig, operated by Shell in the US Gulf of Mexico and currently the deepest deep-sea oil and gas project in the world; and the planet Earth. In each drawing, an unconventional application of the conventional section cut produces figural expressions of poche (blocks, linear angles, mirrored hemispheric curves) that defamiliarize the subjects.
Umbrella and sunflowers, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches, 2018
IN BETWEEN / TOGETHER is an apparatus that engages the space between bodies – drawing inspiration from Judith Butler's description of “a new ‘between’ of bodies.” It is an imagined prosthetic that both allows one body to literally “make space” for another, and yet also makes visible the vulnerability of such a body in relation with other, unfamiliar bodies.
Over the course of a week, the apparatus was designed, constructed, and used to make space in the city of Berkeley, California, to varying effect. Further testing in more locations is recommended.
Designed and executed in collaboration with Amy Louie for Professors Mabel O. Wilson and F. Jason Campbell at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design in spring 2018.
We design objects for our use. Sometimes we love them. Often we accept their existence and attributes as given, as unchangeable, as though we are not their makers. What if we created objects that loved us back? (That nourish, affirm, challenge, play with, grow with us?) What would it feel like to be loved by them? What does the emotional life of the object feel like?
University of California, Berkeley
Master of Architecture
Fall 2017: ARCH201 Architecture & Urbanism Design Studio
Instructor: R. Chow
In which the typology of the public library is leveraged as an amplifer in order to increase legibility, identity, and public space in South of Market, San Francisco, USA. The project uses a strategy of modulation and exaggeration to accommodate an expansive program, seeking to express porosity and presence simultaneously.
University of California, Berkeley
Master of Architecture
Spring 2017: ARCH200B Introduction to Architecture II
Instructor: D. Guthrie, R. Pakravan
Taking as its precedent Rob Quigley’s Torr Kaelan, in San Diego, California, a 11,000 sq ft microbrewery with a tasting room, lab, classrooms, and gallery space. An exercise in the derangement of form.
for NGH and KBMD and all true gliders
uc berkeley, december 2016
image sources: (1) Creative Time, (2) MXCity, (3) Rural Studio, (4) Francis Alÿs, (5) Wikipedia, (6) Voluntary Architects' Network, (7) SCAPE, (8) ELEMENTAL, (9) Space, Not Spikes, (10) FOURM design studio
Aloe and bent demitasse, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 12 inches, 2016
Orange lamp and bottle, acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 inches, 2016
Project completed while employed as a designer at Loubier Design in Philadelphia, USA
Dimensions: 54 L x 20 W x 20 H inches | Material: Elm with cedar bottom
The River Chest was a design collaboration with principal Kirk Loubier, born of a curiosity about a CNC machine’s ability to draw. To address the client’s desire for a cedar chest, I worked backwards from drawings of tributaries on an unfolded box. The resulting patterned puzzle pieces were modeled on Rhino, machined from spalted elm with attention to alternating grain patterns, and then assembled with a cedar bottom. The chest evokes movement and gesture without sacrificing the most basic of functions.
While a teaching artist at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, I was struck by Isaiah Zagar’s description of his work as providing us “a sense of heaven and hell.” I began to refine my dreamy lamp, born from explosive extraction and combustion for the purposes of soothing and guiding us. Three pairs of lamps performed theater on Astro-turf, playing lovers, fighters, and traitors. On each stage, wires dominated, suggesting limbs, linework, and even the reins of Plato’s chariot. Thus, one object becomes a profound expression of the boundaries between the personal and the political, between the real and the imagined, and between estrangement and reunion.
Project completed while employed as a designer at Loubier Design in Philadelphia, USA
Dimensions: 21 L x 17.5 W x 38 H inches | Material: Black walnut hand rubbed with tung oil
The Floating Chair was a design collaboration with principal Kirk Loubier as a material investigation of walnut. How do you make solid walnut float? We designed the Floating Chair on Rhino and programmed the seat and seat-back to be flip-milled by CNC machine. The chair could then be assembled with lapped dado and mortise and tenon joints.
sides of a coin, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches, 2014
But it will be the end of something significant within it, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches, 2014
a substitute and a shadow, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 inches, 2014
India Point Park, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches, 2013
As a queer femme artist of color in a Western culture, I continuously work to reconceptualize the female nude as a vehicle of power with biological and social priorities of her own. The figures are varied: pensive, aggressive, aware or unaware of the viewer, but they all express sexual agency without necessarily being sexualized.
Furniture installation, a collaboratively designed semester-length study of object- and space-making by six Brown University students (Carter Aronson, Brady Caspar, August Doyle, Nic Schumann, George Whitridge, and me), spanning departments from finance and engineering to fine art. Our collectively designed and fabricated oak and powder-coated steel chairs and modular lacquer-painted tables became a two-week interactive exhibition, with support from Professor Richard Fishman and funding from the Creative Arts Council at Brown University.
My undergraduate thesis exhibition, sited in the lobby of the fine arts building and named for Picasso’s bombilla (“light bulb”/“little bomb”) embedded in an eye at the apex of Guernica, explored conflict, agency, and accountability at the intersection of natural and built. The installation brought students and visitors face to face with a topographical map of mountaintop removal coal mining and the patchwork turf used to obscure it. A reflection of my participation in fossil fuel divestment activism on campus, the installation expressed illumination and destruction, our intimate relationship between the private, dreamlike lamp and the public, nightmarish sources with which we power them.
The artwork intentionally sourced blemished sod from nearby Lincoln, Rhode Island, which otherwise would not have been sold by the farmer, and gifted the sod at the conclusion of the exhibition to the student-run garden's composting. The lightbulbs used were on temporary loan by a student group operating a light bulb exchange (CFLs in exchange for incandescents).
Dimensions: 37 x 14 x 15 inches | Material: Poplar
Abstract paintings of these trellis sculptures allowed me to translate the concrete concepts involved, like the logic of natural laws, back into the painterly work I wanted to be making, as in The more you eat, which was created by layering abstract shapes and organic drips. I drew colors and forms from the live plants, and I began to search for ways to make spaces evoke feelings, as in but their most secret thoughts meet as when, based on “The Couple” by Tomas Tranströmer.
Inherent in the act of growing food is the forced confrontation between natural and built. Trellises provide structure, but bean vines remain unpredictable. This idea became the undergraduate fine arts thesis work I began in 2012 with Kentucky blue bean plants (selected for their long, thin, fast-growing vines) seeded in the component parts of painting: stretcher bars, paint, and canvas. The resulting harvest was a collaboration between my beans and me, raising questions of where (and when) food can be grown and what purposes painting can serve.
Red and green, oil on canvas, 24.5 x 16 inches, 2012
Triptych, MDF, 20 x 20 x 15 inches, 2012
Bison, oil on canvas, 46 x 42 inches, 2012
Morning, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 44 inches, 2012
Untitled nude, charcoal on paper, 32 x 50 inches, 2011
