My art investigates the connection between memory, lived experience, and the evolving networks of technologies which we use to record, communicate, and otherwise make sense of our existence. Conceiving the term “technology” quite broadly, my ongoing series Screen Memories appropriates, refracts, and meditates upon select, found images from my personal, familial archive as a way of deconstructing the educational and familial structures – and the attendant political and philosophical paradigms – which the commonplaceness of the snapshot can often conceal.

As a trans woman, I am interested in what revisiting another’s record of my boyhood can teach me about my early, repressed experiences of gender; as a white-passing person of Japanese diaspora, I am interested in what candid scenes of family ritual reveal about my family’s experience of American assimilation; and as an artist, I am interested how learning to play and be creative also served to acculturate me to the presence of capital and Empire.

Taking a hybrid approach to painting and printmaking, my “ghost prints” explore the threshold between handmade and technologically reproduced art. Through series that slowly fade, Screen Memories – as a counterhistory of my boyhood – inflects my photographic past with a textural record of how it feels, as a trans person, to reassemble yourself from the remnants of someone else’s dream.

[updated 09/27/24]