My family is from a people group called the Hakka (“guest”) who fanned out from central China after 800 AD. Some settled in Southeast Asia and later became Singaporean, but the ancestral homeland is lost, swallowed up by the passage of time. Much of my Hakka identity has also been lost through an oral history left withheld and denatured by the construction of “Singaporean.” The provenance of images and materials—their secret histories become a vehicle to explore what is irretrievable in me.

My lived experience in the 21st Century is so different from that of the Hakka a millennia ago, but the same sun and moon preside over our existences. I work with their images and light, hoping to coax a connection backwards in time. I do not have a native land to claim but I can be native to the sky. It is yours as much as mine. If our story of land is marked by exploitation, conquest, and pillage, then what is our corresponding story of the sky?