This installation brings together a collection of identical hats, each coated in natural lacquer. Applied as a liquid, the lacquer penetrates and engulfs the surface layer by layer, slowly reacting with oxygen, hardening and solidifying. What was once soft becomes completely rigid.
The choice of wearable objects is deliberate. Drawing on Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity, I understand clothing as a site of identity construction. We live inside our clothes, and in doing so, we perform who we are. Here, that performance is arrested: the hats, scattered across the wall and stacked into a tower on the floor, are frozen in the lacquer's slow, irreversible process.
In the tradition of East Asian craft, lacquer has long been associated with refinement, smoothness, and the perfect surface, a material that wraps, protects, and conceals. In my hands, it does something different: it accumulates, solidifies, and traps. To me, this mirrors how society shapes fluid, adaptable identities into rigid roles, layer by layer, slowly and irreversibly.
