MICRO JOUISSANCE
By “micro jouissance” I mean the minor, transgressive pleasures that register as both pain and ecstasy—pleasures measured in increments rather than spectacle. It aligns with how I sometimes find satisfaction—almost a mental climax—through restraint, friction, or small punishments. The work attends to that scale of sensation: thresholds where control tips, breath shortens, and the nervous system writes before language does.
then I saw Eros came with enlightenment marked my first dive into a personal pain-and-pleasure circuitry; from there, Micro Jouissance turns the inquiry more sentimental and introspective. I stage the tension between furniture and flesh through materials: an erotic, skin-like liquid silicone rubber—which recalls the body and BDSM—pressed against wood, hemp rope, and metal. Glossy media (silicone, oil, reflective paints) meet coarse planes and wood blocks to heighten a bittersweet charge. Across paintings, sculptures, and installations, I build small micro-rituals—support, pressure, restraint—so the work feels like a quiet initiation, noticed only after you’re inside it.
The use of furniture recalls the “small punishment” captured in then I saw Eros came with enlightenment. My actions often feel like attempts to merge my body with furniture while peeling away what is inorganic and not-me. Testing those boundaries—what makes my body mine, what makes me me—I repeatedly find a sharp border: nothing is fully mine; I am a constructed self adapting to modern life. In the studio, furniture manifests force. My grandparents built stools, small tables, plant hangers; their utility and geometry carry a nostalgia that is equal parts tender and tragic. In this project, real furniture acts as both agent and index of pressure—a lifeless geometry that, when paired with nudity or skin-like surfaces, produces intimacy and unease. Like BDSM’s paradox, a certain freedom appears under force. That is why the pieces keep the figure and the object in tension: not to fuse them, but to let their pressures speak.
Self Portrait (2025)
Medium: antique wooden washstand, silicone, human hair, lace, soil, metal.
This sculpture investigates how my cultural inheritance and gendered expectations meet—sometimes harmonize, often grind. I salvaged a second-hand wooden washstand once common in pre-2000s Chinese homes, a domestic relic from my grandparents’ era. As a Gen-Z viewer I can no longer see it as utility; emptied of function, its frame reads like a restraint device. After testing bodily positions with it, I cast my hand in silicone that grips the top bar and made a skin-like surface hanging in the middle. Inside the hand I embedded human-hair extensions and lace. In Confucian thought, hair signifies filial piety—“身体发肤，受之父母 (the body, including hair, is inherited from one's parents and should not be damaged)”—and, for some Chinese girls like me, it becomes a rule-bound currency of appearance. To me, hair is renewable—closer to grass than taboo—so the extensions both perform and quietly undo that symbolism.
At the base, a silicone cube packed with lace, soil, and my own hair anchors the structure. Lace recalls girlhood femininity—tender, decorative, sometimes traumatic. The soil addresses a lack of the “earth” element a fortune-teller once named in my Wuxing chart; sprinkling hometown soil beneath furniture was the proposed remedy. Here I stage my own micro-ritual, binding furniture and flesh: memory, body, and deficit fused into a device that is part altar, part BDSM apparatus—testing where my “self” begins and ends.
Untitled 1
Medium: silicone, acyrlic, lace, oil on canvas.
Untitled 2
Medium: silicone, acyrlic, oil on canvas.
Palimpskin
Medium: acrylic, silicone, plastic, metal, human hair.
From palimpsest + skin: a surface written, erased, and rewritten where former lines persist as marks and scars. I pour liquid silicone and paint onto clear plastic, then reform, re-inscribe—so rope diagrams, anatomy, and flesh tones remain as ghosted strata. The work is hung free in space so both faces can be read; light moves through it, revealing different drafts of the same object.
Along the lower edge, brass eyelets anchor bundles of my real hair with red cord. This small, I utilitize this stubborn act to turn the piece into a quiet rite: a shrine binding the work to a body and marking the repetition of touch, knot, release.