- CollegeCentral Saint Martins
- CourseBA (Hons) Fine Art
- Graduation year2025
The project begins with a sense of cultural dislocation. As a Tibetan woman born in Chengdu, my relationship with Tibetan culture has always been fragmented, both familiar and distant. Through symbolic materials such as khata and prayer flags, I explore the emotional tension between cultural heritage, embodied memory, and the absence of paternal presence. The work gradually shifts from cultural symbols to intimate rituals, focusing on a childhood gesture of touching the corner of a pillowcase while gently holding the tip of the tongue—a private act of self-soothing. This pillowcase, together with leather sacks from my father’s childhood memories, becomes a vessel for emotional survival and identity reconstruction. These objects, drawn from textile, animal skin, and image, form a fragile psychological structure that navigates between memory and material. The project understands repair not as restoration, but as repetition—a continuous gesture that maintains presence within rupture.
Final work
This work engages with leather as both material and metaphor—a site where memory, cultural inheritance, and emotional survival converge. Composed of hand-stitched scraps from discarded leather, the patchwork references the grain sacks from my father's Tibetan childhood, once used to store food and tea, now emptied of function but saturated with symbolic weight. Through repetitive stitching, the act of assembly becomes a ritual of repair, echoing gestures of self-soothing I developed in early childhood to cope with absence and displacement.
Invisible ink inscriptions in Tibetan, Chinese, and English are written onto the suede surface—illegible under normal light, but revealed under ultraviolet exposure. This process mimics the ways memory surfaces: not always available, but latent, waiting under the right conditions. Language here becomes a fractured code, a deferred connection to ancestry, identity, and silence. In its final state, the leather patchwork is transformed into a pouch-like vessel and placed in the branches of a tree. This gesture marks a return to containment—not of utility, but of unresolved memory, embodied care, and persistent attempts to hold oneself together.
Repair, in this work, is not resolution. It is an act of endurance. A slow choreography of stitching, remembering, and reconfiguring what cannot be restored, only carried.
Touching Pillowcase Corner – Line Animation
This digital video renders a private childhood gesture—gently touching the corner of a pillowcase while lightly holding the tongue with the teeth—into a line-based animation that repeats endlessly. Detached from the body’s surface yet deeply tied to its memory, the drawing enacts a loop of quiet survival. What was once an unconscious act of self-soothing becomes diagrammatic, ritualized, and rhythmically disembodied.
In dialogue with the leather patchwork installation, which archives emotional weight through tactile assemblage, this work offers a temporal counterpart—fleeting, flattened, yet insistent. The digital line removes warmth and texture, yet preserves the compulsion, the micro-movement, the nervous choreography of staying intact.
Here, comfort is not resolved but rehearsed. The animation suggests that repair is not a return to wholeness, but a gesture performed again and again in the absence of stability. Within this broader practice of material and psychological reconstruction, the body becomes both the archive and the algorithm of care.
Research and process
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Holding Through Repair
The project begins with a sense of cultural dislocation. As a Tibetan woman born in Chengdu, my relationship with Tibetan culture has always been fragmented, both familiar and distant. Through symbolic materials such as khata and prayer flags, I explore the emotional tension b...
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