In the spring of 2024, I started shooting a large number of videos from my apartment balcony. The act came from a kind of intuition, with no initial purpose or reason. But as these videos accumulated, their repetitive nature gave them the potential to be combined into a body of work. The repeated filming from the balcony was an unusual form of gaze—a way of imposing attention onto an environment that had previously served merely as a backdrop to daily life. The act of attending to them keeps answering a simple but deep question: what happens when nothing happens?
While editing and reviewing these video clips, I realized that these shots also felt closely tied to a certain sense of homesickness. This quietly stirring emotion was not a concrete longing for a specific place or family, but rather, while living in a foreign place, an almost instinctual pull from my distant home—something I felt when witnessing eternal things like the river, the sky, and the shifting weather. My body and my mind, standing in separate spaces, looked far ahead. The two vistas met inside my heart, and at a certain moment, both grew misty and dreamlike, as though lifted out of reality. Perhaps it was this homesickness-adjacent feeling that drove me, with something close to obsession, to repeatedly look out from the balcony and turn my lens toward the passing cargo ships, the sky, and the river.
After this, I took the balcony and its outward view as a motif and painted several more works. They capture both the comfort of having a bit of shelter in a foreign place, and the hazy longing when the scene before me overlaps with my hometown in my mind.
The work submitted here is made of collage on wood and drawing on paper. The collage draws from my English notes and textbooks from the language course at SCAD—emblems of the effort and unease required by a new culture, yet also tokens of beautiful memories and growth. On top of this collage, I used gongbi brushwork (fine brush) on Chinese xuan paper (rice paper) to render the balcony door of my US apartment. Gongbi is my artistic native tongue; the balcony, where I looked out to the Savannah River every day. The xuan paper’s translucency lets the image and collage blend smoothly. The yellow circle at the center evokes the full moon—a Chinese sign of nostalgia—while subtly framing the background question: “How grateful are you?” That question, heavy yet bright, reminds me how precious it is to enjoy life and expand my view, and how much my family has given to make that possible.
