My revelational experience at Penland
At the risk of sounding dramatic, going to Penland for the first time changed my life. Penland School of Craft is an immersive art and craft school based in the woods an hour outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Their main programming is a seasonal,…
Minimalist collage: a creative trek
At the end of February, I embarked on yet another creative trek as part of Kening Zhu’s labyrinth community. The practice that I chose for this trek was minimalist collage (maximum 2-5 pieces of paper). Keeping it minimalist was important to me, because I’ve tried collage…
It took me 4 years to recover from burnout.
On Monday, I went to two dance classes back to back, a feat I haven’t attempted in years. Then yesterday on Tuesday, I went to a 3-hour textile printing class. That means back to back days of self-directed, somewhat strenuous evening commitments. Normally in…
Analog collage
I attempted to do a 5-day solo creative trek, and ended up only completing one day of it. The compositional aspect of collage still appeals to me, but cutting and pasting don’t. Maybe in the future I’ll find another way to exercise this longing…
Letters to Future Me
I subscribe to this service that reminds me to send a letter to future me in a year. I’ve sent one in 2022, 2023, 2024, (not sure why I skipped 2025) and just wrote the one for 2026. I think this is a fascinating…
This season of unraveling
If I had to describe the main theme of this current season of my life (let’s say, of the past three months) it would be “unraveling”. A bunch of events coincided with the end of summer for me this year: a trip to Toronto,…
Diving into my darkroom practice
I’m deep in my photography obsession and created 3 new darkroom prints in my closet this weekend. Swivel was created using a technique some call “photopainting”. After exposing the negative normally, instead of dunking the entire paper into a tray of developer chemical, I dipped…
My two-week writing trek
For the past two weeks I’ve embarked on a self-designed, self-directed creative trek as part of Kening Zhu’s labyrinth community. A trek is similar to the popular concept of a “challenge”, but less “this is my goal, and I have to do it every…
Freestyling my calligraphy
Sometimes I forget how far I’ve come as a dancer. Not in the sense that I forget the milestones I’ve hit, but in the sense that I forget how difficult certain aspects of dance used to be for me. In dance, freestyling — as…
In defense of pettiness
During my time living in San Francisco, I picked up a new way of interacting with others that didn’t exist in my Asian immigrant household. Going to talk therapy had started to become normalized, and the book “Non-Violent Communication” was being read by every…