Barbie

2024

Photography (Cooked rice and mold fungi)

11x16 inches

 

This work begins with a made-in-Hong Kong Barbie—a relic from the 1960s, when the city’s identity shifted under the weight of global capitalism. As Hong Kong emerged as a manufacturing hub, its rice fields—once cultivated by indigenous families and war refugees—were paved over by factories. By 1972, Hong Kong had become the world’s leading exporter of plastic toys, producing for major American companies like Mattel and Hasbro. These toys, made for export, formed part of an economy where local labor fueled foreign imagination.
 

I grew up playing with Barbie dolls, which is both an artifact and a symbol: a figure that shaped my early ideas of femininity, race, and desire, even before I could articulate them. In this series, I return to her form—not to replicate, but to reconfigure. I cast Barbie in rice, a material rooted in the region’s agrarian past, and stain her surface with fungi, which spread and mutate. This gesture is both decay and reclamation.

Through this act, I ask: What remains when a place’s memory is overwritten by industry? What happens when a girl grows up playing with an icon that erases her own likeness?