Abstract

I grew up in Shanghai, China—a megacity with over 25 million people. I was privileged enough to avoid the grueling fate of taking the National College Entrance Examination (Gaokao). At 16, I moved to Sewanee, a small college town in rural Appalachia with a population of only 3,000. Overshadowed by that curiosity was the collision of two worlds and my sense of belonging and identity. I wasn’t fully aware of how I watched and copied others’ behaviors and mannerisms to blend in as an adolescent. Being a minority in the middle of nowhere Tennessee meant I was conditioned into fitting in by code-switching. Almost nine years later, I am now an international student who has, at least from the outside, assimilated. In truth, I occupy the in-between space of being both an insider and an outsider. Like a Rolling Lychee is part of an ongoing attempt at self-restoration. The work stems from my struggles and experiences of being a parachute kid. Through constructing landscapes, self-portraits, family archives, and still lives in the darkroom, I reshape identity, loss, desire, memory, food, language, translation, and rootlessness. Drawing from the work of artists Pao Houa Her, Tommy Kha, and Masao Yamamoto, I piece together my diasporic experience with different materials and sources. Grounded in a wide array of alternative photographic processes, my work manifests the impermanent nature of home, suggesting its duality: nowhere yet everywhere.

Publication Date

5-1-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Photography and Related Media (MFA)

Department, Program, or Center

Photographic Arts and Sciences, School of

College

College of Art and Design

Advisor

Joshua Thorson

Advisor/Committee Member

Gregory Halpern

Advisor/Committee Member

Carole Woodlock

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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