In 2020, during a KING 5 interview, a local student from “AAPI Against Hate” discussed how this is the “first time” Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) have fought back. While we congratulate and appreciate her empowerment, we are dismayed by her ignorance. In 2022, a group of concerned multicultural UW students from American Ethnic Studies came together with students from other disciplines to create a comic novella, KingDOOM: How Protestors Saved Seattle’s Chinatown, focusing on the AAPI protests from 50 years ago against the Kingdome encroachment that led to the creation of many Chinatown International District (CID) agencies. In 2022, we successfully applied for a city grant to publish our comic book. Yet, as we honor the 50th Anniversary of the protestors, we were shocked by the dual announcement that the light rail is demolishing a part of the CID, followed by news that the King County Council will be expanding a mega-shelter to be built adjacent to our community – when there are already 20 shelters within walking distance of the CID. Meanwhile, we are still feeling the impact of the pandemic, anti-Asian Hate, vandalism, business closures, racism, and xenophobia. We were compelled to expand our book honoring the 70’s protestors to our current fight, demonstrating solidarity of the past with the present. As we photographed, researched, interviewed, and participated in current-day protests, we witnessed former seventies activists united with the elderly and young adults, marching to public meetings, and attending rallies, press conferences, and workshops. While there is a temporary moratorium on the light rail and the mega-shelter expansion, we feel that we must end our narrative here, even though we acknowledge that our struggle continues. We have been working since September 2022 and our project will be completed by June 2023.

This installation is part of ongoing research I am conducting through my interdisciplinary art practice, blossoming out of a fascination with people, their immediate experience, language and healing. When someone interacts with a space or object, whether it is a work of art, another person or the natural world, the felt sense in their body changes, sometimes in subtle and transient ways, other times more obviously pervading. Shortly after absorbing, expressing or repressing the feeling of the moment, language is often added in an attempt to identify the intangible experience we are having. This process happens almost instantaneously. So why does this matter? This matters because artists, similarly to therapists or children, have the unique potential to meet people and moments exactly where they are, an act of empathetic courage that is so desperately needed on a large scale in today's world. Does the potency of a moment change in an environment where words and other technologies are very intentionally omitted or integrated? How do the spaces we inhabit enforce monotony and isolation? Can prolonged attention empower individuals to feel seen and connected to places and people they were otherwise unassociated with? These are some of the questions I am diving into. This project hypothesizes that understanding is not primarily linguistic, instead an energetic and artistic practice that can be catalyzed with loving-awareness and time as a medium. In this research, I am linking together social action, craft, performance art, science and alchemy in hopes of creating validated individuals and therefore more kind and conscious communities.

In a world where many die before their time, in this climate catastrophe, in this collapsing capitalocene, I perform the grief web. I gather discarded materials from city streets — clothes, bedclothes, shoes, boxes, bags — and weave them into trees. Through these ephemeral site-specific installations, I transform what has been abandoned into precious, intricate landscapes. And, in the tradition of the memorial t-shirts people in my neighborhood make for our dead, I create shirt-poems. On the shirt, I write my grief in tangles of inarticulacy: fragments of poetry, maps, sketches, rhizomes, roots, magpies, vultures. On the inside, against my skin, I write the names of kin whose deaths shape my life: family (blood, chosen, given, found), nonhuman people groups (species) extinct in Turtle Island/North America, childhood friends, people murdered by the police, all neighbors who die before their time. Wearing this poem, I go into the forest and tear my shirt in grief, weaving its threads into my hair, the trees, mud, and moss. I record these rituals and present them in video fragments intermixed with sound recordings of local birds (live sounds) and extinct birds (ghost sounds). These birds, as well as the trees, mud, wind, and rain are my co-artists. We mark each other, tearing, scratching, staining, composing and decomposing each other. Following Cecilia Vicuña, Judith Butler, Anna Tsing, Thom Van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, and Donna Haraway, we become kin in interdependent multispecies worlds. Following magpies, who mourn their dead, we perform funerals for roadkill. Following vultures, who recycle corpses, we shape our lives around the deaths of others, and transform death into precarious life. Entangled, we perform precarious life for our dead and dying kin. Here, in the grief web, we become-together in grief.

Southeast Asian communities in the United States and in Asia have a preexisting notion that whiteness equates to beauty and that fair complexions are standard. The colorist mindset is implicitly taught through the media, magazines, workplaces, and most commonly the average Asian family household. Teachings of anti-Blackness are introduced from a young age by advertising the use of whitening products, avoidance of the sun, or not being allowed to wear any clothing that exposes skin because of the risk of tanning. This generational upbringing negatively impacts the way young Asian Americans view themselves, view others, and continues the cycle of internalized colorism and anti-Blackness. My research explores how cultural upbringing, generational trauma, and family dynamic influences the understanding of anti-Blackness being something ingrained into Southeast Asian communities. Through conducting interviews and surveys, I examine how colorism is represented and inherently taught within these communities and the ways it has negatively impacted younger generations in terms of self-image. Rather than presenting statistical research, my research presents in the form of a magazine consisting of stories, original art, and portraiture. By incorporating my skills as a photographer and designer, my research encourages audiences to engage on a more interpersonal level to confront the ways colorism exists in our communities and how we can begin a journey of healing and unlearning our prejudiced biases. The results of this project are displayed through a collaborative, ongoing magazine where the interviews are transcribed as articles with photography and original artwork connecting to the theme of colorism and anti-Blackness. This magazine uses the research collected from the interviews and surveys to produce a design piece that shares experiences, allows audiences and participants to be vulnerable, and explores how socio-political topics can be translated through art/design.

Have you ever watched a true crime show? I’d be surprised if you said no. Stories of violent crime inundate the entertainment offered to individuals whether you’re looking for a TV show or a podcast. People’s worst moments are retold for TV audiences under the guise of investigation. While crime media has always been popular, true crime media, television in particular, is having a moment of unprecedented popularity. Drawing from my own experiences as a white middle-class viewer of true crime I wonder what the dangers of this genre's popularity are. This project investigates this by asking how the consumption of others' trauma through true crime television impacts how individuals who have no contact with the criminal justice system understand violence and crime. It asks whether or not this creates additional distance between individuals who are not system impacted and those who are. And finally, it wonders if true crime's popularity can be used to put its viewers in conversation with abolition. Using Dateline NBC episodes as its archive, this project hopes to navigate the complicated nature of true crime viewership and its harms. The archive of Dateline episodes provides examples of key narratives within true crime as well as facilitates a true crime viewing experience informed by abolitoinist politic. The patterns observed in Dateline are put in conversation with my academic research to both attempt to answer my research questions as well as articulate critiques of true crime television. These intentions are creatively rendered into a zine that synthesizes my research as well as my relationship to the genre and Dateline specifically. I hope that this project inspires individuals to engage critically with their entertainment and understand that entertainment is a means of perpetuating hegemony.

In 2020, inclement weather spoiled over 1,800 pounds of produce at the UW Farm - roughly 15% of annual production. The resilienncy tunnel, our design for a greenhouse is intended to protect crops and extend the production season by multiple months, eliminating the need to quickly harvest spoiling crops in extreme weather using single-use plastic bags to deliver to the UW Food Pantry. The execution and operation of this project will notably contribute towards action VI of the UW Sustainability Action Plan, involving a target that 35% of campus food is from local sources by 2025. Our team shares the ambitious goal of designing an agricultural structure and landscape that sustainably and respectfully gives back to the community and surrounding areas with three key pillars: Resilience, Renewability, and Reciprocity. The Resiliency Tunnel, a 1500 square foot greenhouse and 600 sf educational space, will enable the UW Farm to grow produce with higher nutritional value in greater quantities and ensure that this produce reaches food-insecure populations. The UW Farm supplies dining halls, the UW Food Pantry, and the greater community with produce each year. As the climate changes, however, the increasing discrepancy between high demand during the academic year and high production during the summer growing season results in inadequate supply during the spring and fall. A greenhouse facilitates resilience against these conditions through crop protection and temperature control. Our proposal incorporates passive thermal design, a solar array, and rainwater catchment integrated with the structure and the landscape. 

The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN) study is a voluntary SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) testing program that enrolled participants across Seattle and King County. We collected self-reported demographic data, vaccination status, SARS-CoV-2 test results, and viral genomes from study participants. The reason visualizing this biological and logistics data is so important is so that we can analyze the Covid 19 pandemic and learn how to put measures in place to prevent future pandemics. In our dashboard, we visualized demographic and molecular data on study participants and circulating pathogens using a mix of data analysis with Python, Amazon Web Services tools, and dynamic Tableau dashboards. With data from ~69,000 swab samples collected from May 1st, 2020, to July 31st, 2022, the result was a robust map of COVID-19 trends across King County. Moving forward, our project seeks to explore what it takes to run a community surveillance program for respiratory disease, looking to answer questions such as: Who the people were who used SCAN? Were there any power users vs one-time participants? How effectively did the study reach low-income participants? How many requests from high-income regions did we have to deny every day to get representative samples? Can we identify any opportunities in kit fulfillment? Additionally, how can we gauge the costs of couriering samples, and can we find a less costly alternative? The results of this analysis looking at the SCAN community surveillance program will influence the design of future public health measures to reduce barriers to healthcare; curb community pathogen spread; better allocate resources to support community health. Our goal is to create a future where we can adequately identify and treat diseases before they become pandemics.

The global pandemic has had profound effects on the world and workplace, causing issues such as high employee burnout and turnover across industries. In our project, we delve deeper into workplace implications of the pandemic by studying how it affected employee motivation and commitment in non-profit organizations. We focus on non-profit organizations as they represent a unique context in which not all workers earn salaries and many choose to work in these organizations, despite low wages, due to intrinsic reasons such as value-alignment or social impact. We studied whether non-profit workers experienced lower motivation and commitment due to the pandemic. Using personal and professional networks and various social media platforms, we identifed relevant target respondents. We collected quantitative data from 21 employees across multiple non-profits through an online survey and conducted 5 employee interviews to collect qualitative data from 5 non-profits. Our results indicate that post-pandemic motivation for non-profit workers remained largely unchanged and surprisingly even increased marginally in some cases; commitment remained unchanged or decreased slightly. Interestingly, we observed little or no change in extra-role behaviors (i.e., workplace activities beyond the organizationally mandated roles) with both positive behaviors, such as helping coworkers, and negative behaviors, such as ostracizing coworkers, remaining largely stable. We discuss potential explanations for our empirical findings. Althought a sample size of 21 respondents does not have enought statistical power to produce reliable and generalizable results, our findings based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data provide interesting and somewhat counterintuitive insights into the effects of the pandemic on workforce motivation and commitment in non-profits. This project contributes to the growing research on how the pandemic differently impacted workers across various industries, and lays the groundwork for exploring how non-profit organizatons can be uniquely affected by such global events.

Chinese tumultous history has seen political uprisings and cultural changes, which often saw many centuries of history to be lost to time. The most recent revolution comes in the form of industry, elevating China from a rural agrarian society to an economic powerhouse. In just the last three decades, China sped through progress faster than any country before it and the effects of that speed can be seen in its social, historical and cultural landscape. Having spent two years in the city of Suzhou, China, the experience of seeing the progress of the country my parents left and the one I lived shows a clear difference which made me understand the necessity of cultural preservation in the face of industrialization. Suzhou transformed from a Heritage city to one of industry and while city life flourishes, our way of living and culture becomes an imitation of the West. Under the bright city lights at night that depict Suzhou’s modernity, I came to see the emptiness of a city that fully embraced urbanization and commercialization with little respect for its original inhabitants. As the city grew younger, I walked near empty streets, abandoned skyscrapers, and shopping malls full of Western brands that illustrated the irrelevancy of history in the face of progress. Painting becomes a way to examine historical roots and values of Chinese art, searching for a resolution between China’s past and present and asking the viewer to reflect on the impacts of industrialization.