Chinatown Reverie (2018-2024)

Made over six years across the Chinatowns of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Vancouver, and Helsinki, Chinatown Reverie traces what travels with a diaspora when it crosses an ocean. The same red lanterns above different streets. The same characters painted on different windows. The same gestures of cooking, gathering, and waiting, performed in different weather.I photograph these neighborhoods as a Chinese person born in Hong Kong who has lived most of my life away from it. The Chinatowns I move through are not the home I left, but they hold something of it — a scaffolding of memory, language, and color that persists even as the cities around them change. The work attends to the small, durable things: a steam-fogged window, a neon sign hand-lettered in two languages, an elder eating alone at a corner table, the way late light falls on a tiled facade. It is the reverie of looking at something familiar from a partial distance — not nostalgia exactly, but the awareness that home, for some of us, is a hand-made thing that has to be assembled out of fragments wherever we land.