txt Bodies of Work

BODIES OF WORK is a personal archive of my sketchbooks and painted series—six collections drawn from different moments of my life and practice, each with its own rhythm, urgency, and emotional weather. Together, they offer a loose chronology of my artistic evolution, my gender transition, and the various selves I’ve inhabited and shed along the way.

The book begins with Diary and Others, a constellation of pages selected from an old diary and four early sketchbooks. These works weren’t made as separate bodies but in tandem—threaded through the same stretch of time like knots on the same string. For clarity, they’re presented in order of their start dates, though their emotions often run parallel or loop back on themselves.

My Tày Sketchbook follows—an uncontainable, sprawling work made during a period of homecoming and re-rooting. Like Diary and Others, it’s represented here selectively due to its sheer volume, yet what’s chosen offers a portrait of cultural entanglement, dislocation, and a deepening relationship with material and memory.

Next is The Teddy Series, a set of oil paintings made during a period of intense emotional processing. Unlike the rest of this archive, these works are not presented by date but are paired intuitively—linked by affect, like a conversation between shadows and tenderness.

The final three sketchbooks—Fallen Fruits, in Singularity, and Letter to Cologne—are shown in full, each a compact world, a season of thought. These are clearer chapters, each forged during different phases of rebuilding. In them, collage, drawing, pigment, ink, and fragments of text act not just as mediums but as means of survival and transformation.

These collections are not just bodies of work but works of a body—becoming, breaking, and building again.