I always believe that for the artists, a quality group critique is crucial during their working process. It allows the artists not only to understand the project itself more comprehensive through different perspectives, but also to seek for answers and experiences from others to solve their concerns and confirm their thoughts. Meeting with my mentor and talking with my friends who also make art for the past few months provides me the opportunities to reflect my practice path and push my ideas further. At the beginning of the summer, I was struggled to find a uniform way to build my works together as my thoughts and materials were scattered in many different forms. I told this issue to my mentor, Barbara Weissberger, she talked me through my works thoughtfully that encourages me to continue exploring the potentials of my ideas based on what I had as well as focusing on each work to develop them in a way that I feel most excited about.

One of my favorite parts of being an artist is that even though in an upsetting moment like now when we have to stay at home and terrible things happen around the world, I could still use my work to shelter my feelings and thoughts and talk to people through the works. Since the world-wide outbreak of COVID-19 happened, there are a lot of artworks were inspired and created by people all around the world. Some works were created to comfort people and some were criticizing the problems. Projects from all over the world are shared to promote discussions among people with different opinions. I feel lucky for working an artist especially when I have questions or concerns that are complicated or controversial. The process of making art is also a process of unveiling the hidden feelings and answers.

A lot of my works are focusing on cultural and racial topics as I am experiencing these topics myself. If I had a chance to collaborate on a creative project with someone in the Pitt Community, I’d love to work with the Pitt diversity team or people of different colors. Being a foreigner with an Asian face in the US gives me a lot of thoughts about how things could be changed and improved. I wanted to learn more from the others who have similar experiences and to learn how they think about their surroundings.