Afterimage: Borrowed Flora

2025

Engraved aluminum in artist’s frame

60 x 40 inches

Museum Collection: The Phillips Collection, 2026

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Afterimage: Borrowed Flora is an engraving on aluminium that uses the gestures of drawing to respond to historical photographs. Its shifting visual effect in between positive and negative images recalls early daguerreotype photographs, in which visibility changes according to the viewer’s angle and position. The work reconfigures 19th-century postcards depicting young Chinese women into empty relics centred on the presence of a laundry chair, reflecting on the erased histories of Chinese women’s immigration to the United States. Hong Kong historically served both as a port through which young women were sent abroad and as a site where many such portraits were produced. The work questions how power operates within imperial and colonial histories of image-making, circulation, and representation, particularly through the entanglement of female bodies and botany.

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These photographs often depict a woman seated on a chair, her body angled away from the camera in a pose that suggests passivity. Rather than meeting the camera’s gaze directly, she looks to the side, appearing to accommodate the gaze directed toward her. The sitter is surrounded by carefully arranged botanical elements, porcelain, fabrics, and interior furnishings. In my work, the photographic backdrop becomes the subject itself. By removing the sitter, I draw attention to her absence and to the power structures surrounding the female body: the labour, gaze, and systems operating both inside and outside the photographic frame.