In a temple in Shanxi, I stood before a clay sculpture of the Ghost Mother. What stopped me was not her form, but her gaze — a look of tenderness and compassion that I had only ever seen on a mother's face as she may watch her child. I understood, in that moment, why it struck me so deeply: it was my grandmother's face. A woman I never knew, who had passed away when I was one year old, whose warmth I can only access through my mother's stories.

My grandmother survived the bombing of Chongqing during World War II. She was a child then, and the air-raid shelters were so crowded that she couldn't breathe. One day, when the air raid siren sounded again, she made a decision: she stayed home, lay down on her bed, and thought — If I die, I die. She survived. That act of quiet defiance — choosing stillness over the crush of survival — has lived in my imagination ever since.

I was born in Chongqing, a city built inside mountains, a city that seems to possess one more dimension than ordinary places. My path to school ran up stone staircases that seemed to have no visible end, each step worn smooth by generations of feet. Those stone bricks held my childhood. I did not know then that I was already learning something about what material can carry.

I studied painting first, but I could not find my voice in it. What drew me were the clay figures and murals of ancient temples — mythological, fierce, achingly human — the kind of art that does not represent a soul but is one. In graduate school, I began sculpting characters from the stories I had always carried: figures from Chinese myth and folklore, each waiting to be given a body.

But a figure alone was not enough. I wanted to build entire worlds — the total, immersive atmospheres I had felt inside cave temples and ruined shrines, where architecture, image, and spirit become a single experience. The question became: how do I create characters and the world they inhabit?

The answer came from an old story. Meng Jiangnü wept so hard at the Great Wall that the stones crumbled, releasing her husband's bones from inside. The image struck me with force: the Wall was built with the lives of tens of thousands. Each brick a vessel of human labor, suffering, and memory. A relic is not just a remnant — it is a container of souls.

I began making bricks.

I believe that a person — or a civilization — does not truly die when their body ceases to exist. They die when they cease to exist in anyone's memory. The brick is the container I have chosen: not for a monument, but for preservation. My grandmother's decision on that bed, my mother's voice telling the story, the gaze of that clay figure in Shanxi — if I do not build them into something material, they will disappear when I do. The brick is my argument against that potential disappearance.

The figures I design are pressed into or emerging from brick surfaces — not decorating the brick, but imprisoned within it. They are the souls inside the wall, laboring on my behalf, building the scenes from my memory, constructing a world that is simultaneously ancient and not yet born.

My first attempt to embed handmade figures into brick forms failed — the imprecision of hand-sculpting could not hold the structural consistency I needed. That failure led me to 3D modeling and 3D printing. What I discovered was unexpected: when a precisely modeled digital surface is translated into fired ceramic, it accumulates cracks, irregular textures, and unintended ruptures. The digital algorithm becomes material. The machine's ideal is undone by fire. The digital body acquires the fragility of flesh.

This is the paradox at the center of my practice. I use the most advanced technologies available to reconstruct something ancient, only for the ancient material to absorb and transform the digital. The result is neither purely handmade nor purely technological — it is a hybrid artifact: a relic of the present moment.

Meng Jiangnü's story gave me another kind of uneasy feeling. The Great Wall was built from countless lives — each brick carried by a person who was conscripted, consumed, and ultimately forgotten. In my studio in California, a printer can replicate in hours what once took a human body weeks of labor. This does not make me proud. It makes me uneasy. When labor can be translated into data, do the traces left behind still carry the same weight? What do we exchange when we replace physical work with the ease and convenience of software?

I left China carrying memories I cannot fully articulate — the smell of incense in mountain temples, the weight of mythologies absorbed before I had language for them, the particular texture of a culture that measures time in dynasties. Living in America, those memories do not fade; they become petrified. They become the sediment from which I build.

My installations are imagined as future ruins — scenes from a past that never quite existed and a future that hasn't arrived. The figures trapped in my bricks are building these scenes on my behalf, laboring inside their material containers the way all of us labor within the bodies, languages, and histories we inherit.

The Ghost Mother in that Shanxi temple moved me because her tenderness was not abstract. It was specific. It was the love of one person for another, made permanent in clay. My grandmother lay down on her bed and decided to live or die on her own terms — and somehow, that surrender became survival, which allowed my mother to exist, which allowed my mother's love to bring me into the world, which brought me to that temple, to stand before that figure, and to understand what fired earth can hold.

I do not offer answers about what endures. I offer structures — fragile, monumental, cracked — and ask you to consider what is kept inside them.