I am interested in understanding the emotive experience of people who are giving care, and how care work affects their emotional lives.

In 2020, I had an urge to create representational and specific images and felt un urgency to record my own experience of mothering. Below is an excerpt from the project description that I submitted for grant application.*

This is not only because the self is the subject that every artist has at her or his disposition, but also because for me, recounting the story of my own motherhood is a process towards empowerment. As a person ascribed a minority-status due to my ethnic background, as an étranger (stranger) living in Genève, it is also important that I tell my story in the first person point of view. It is a way to resist dismissive and patronising voices that are trying to define who I am. Therefore, drawing and painting my day-to-day experience of mothering is a way of affirming my own choices that led to practice mothering in this country.

I believe my paintings delivered in book-format will provide to the people of Geneva an opportunity to glimpse the everyday reality of mothering in a family that is considered as “Others” in Switzerland. Hopefully, my images would be liberating to some, giving them a chance to break free from her or his assumptions about Asian women with children.

At the same time, my desire is that people, including myself, would be more curious about different and sometimes difficult situations that people have to live through as they are struggling to bring up a healthy human being in this broken world.

*I wasn’t successful at receiving the grant. Instead I was given an opportunity to show “Painting Mothering” series at Ruine Gallery.