Dust that Never Settles

Statement

Dust that Never Settles is a mixed-media painting series that explores the complexities of identity shaped by cultural collision and migration. Through processes of material construction and deconstruction, the work responds to existential questions of “Where do I come from?” and “What have I become?”

Project - Dust that Never Settles Rooted in my personal immigration experience and postcolonial history, the series reflects the tensions of hybridity—between intimacy and alienation, presence and absence, fragmentation and reconstruction. Identity is viewed as a dynamic process: an effort to take root, while also navigating the condition of uprootedness. This shifting state speaks to the fluid and continually evolving nature of selfhood.

Visually, I combine the formal language of Western abstraction with the aesthetics of Eastern traditions to create a hybrid visual vocabulary. This contradictory painting process mirrors the evolution of cultural identity through conflict and fusion.

The works incorporate architectural and everyday materials— soil, brick fragments, clay, cement, plaster, sand, and nails—as the foundation of each composition. These elements carry deep symbolic meaning. Cement and plaster, typically associated with construction, become vessels of cultural memory; nails suggest both rupture and connection. Together, they underscore identity as something sedimented through landscape, daily life, and history—not an abstract ideal, but a grounded reality.