Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My practice interrogates how institutional systems shape the circulation of knowledge and conditions of visibility. Since 2018, I have focused on censorship within carceral systems as a primary site of inquiry, tracing how institutional policies determine which narratives circulate and which are systematically excluded.

This inquiry extends to the regulation of Asian women-identifying bodies within carceral systems, where the body becomes a site of control and social policing. I work with redacted files, prohibited materials, informal archives, and state records to reveal racialized and gendered exclusions embedded in administrative structures that present themselves as neutral.

I translate these institutional records into material and spatial forms, treating invisibility as a structural condition. Through this process, I map how public and bureaucratic infrastructures organize access to knowledge and reproduce hierarchies of legitimacy and belonging.

While At Headlands

While at Headlands, I will work on Mapping Carceral Censorship: The State of California, a social sculpture that examines how prison censorship determines which knowledge circulates and what remains excluded from public understanding. As a new phase of my long-term database project, Coding Carceral Censorship, this work has been developed in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library since 2023. Drawing from the library’s historical redlining maps—where neighborhoods such as the Western Addition and Chinatown were marked “hazardous,” leading to decades of disinvestment—I approach carceral censorship in California as a continuation of intellectual redlining. Using records of prison-banned publications as primary material, the project weaves together archival investigation and material production. Patterns within the banned-book data expose how authors are disproportionately excluded along racial and gendered lines. During the residency, I will focus on sculptural production in preparation for a public presentation at the Main Library of the San Francisco Public Library in 2027, further examining how library infrastructures and carceral boundaries shape California’s cultural landscape.