magnificent machines | magnificent rumors | magnetic dreams

(2023-2025)

magnificent machines | magnificent rumors | magnetic dreams (2025) is a continuation of my practice using heat as both medium and methodology. Thermal imaging becomes a tool to interrogate the politics of visibility, surveillance, and knowledge-gatekeeping. By manipulating the thermal camera’s representational limits, I poetically subvert its instrumental logic—constructing optical illusions through body heat that resist the imperial gaze and unsettle the assumed objectivity of the violent machine.

Finally, magnificent machines | magnificent rumors | magnetic dreams (2025) is a film magnifying the seduction and pitfalls of remembering and forgetting. It braids multiple voices, including a conversation about alzheimers in my matriarchal lineage; a recording from my past life regression hypnosis with Astrologer Evelyn Zuel; and a speculative historical fiction uncovering scandalous rumors around Empress Myeongseong, the last Empress of Corea and a liberatory figure against the Japanese. magnificent machines | magnificent rumors | magnetic dreams asks what memories—historical or personal—do we choose to remember, misremember, or forget entirely? And when technology becomes the record-keeper, is there any way to escape nation-state nostalgia, machine dreaming, and the colonialist psyche it may replicate?

 I don’t want to dream magnetic dreams anymore. 

Exhibited and made for the Viet Voice’s AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship (2025).