Black Dahlias
Like the flower itself, which promises beauty while concealing deeper truths, the series documents the gap between aspiration and outcome in contemporary American life. These photographs trace the seductive darkness beneath the American Dream — the betrayals, transformations, and unresolved mysteries embedded in the national landscape. The work suggests that America's most enduring story is not triumph but the haunting persistence of what remains unresolved, unfulfilled, and deliberately forgotten.
Only If There Are Angels In Your Head Will You Ever, Possibly, See One
Perception is not passive reception but a kind of grace, and the divine reveals itself only to an eye already prepared to find it. These photographs are less a record of strangers than an argument about attention. Each frame becomes an act of devotion: a wager that grace is a function of looking, and that anyone, for the length of an exposure, might be more than they appear.
Half & HalfShot across Asian streetscapes where my mixed-race Asian body marks me as visibly outside, the camera becomes both barrier and bridge: a tool that justifies presence while acknowledging permanent distance. These photographs map the geography of in-betweenness — the perpetual foreigner's attempt to claim belonging through observation rather than inheritance. The work documents not places but the act of reaching toward them, suggesting that for those caught between cultures, participation itself, the devoted attention of looking, becomes the closest available form of home.
American Folklore
Like folkloric ghosts tied to unfinished business, these images capture the symbols, rituals, and performances of American identity that refuse to fade: flags, guns, strip malls, and gestures of belonging that feel simultaneously authentic and rehearsed. This series investigates the nation's most persistent hauntings — not supernatural but cultural, the enduring stereotypes that hover between caricature and documentary truth. The work asks whether these recurring visions represent the country's actual spirit or merely its most visible apparition — the translucent image America projects to itself and the world, caught between what it was, what it claims to be, and what it cannot escape.
Civilization SignaturesThese photographs document the vernacular museology of everyday American life — the art ordinary people choose to hang on their walls as declarations of aspiration, memory, and belonging. Each image functions as a portrait without figures, where mass-produced landscapes, family photographs, and decorative objects become inadvertent autobiographies of taste, class, and the desire for meaning within domestic space. The work suggests that civilization's true signature is not found in institutions but in these quiet, unexamined choices: the ways we attempt to dignify our walls and, by extension, ourselves.
Stone Tape Theory
Stone Tape theory suggests that traumatic or highly emotional events can be "recorded" or absorbed by physical environments and later replayed as residual hauntings. This series transforms the paranormal concept of environmental memory into a meditation on abandonment and environmental afterlife. These photographs document the physical evidence of human inhabitation in forsaken spaces: the residue of touch, use, and eventual absence embedded in deteriorating materials. The work inverts the theory's premise, suggesting that in our contemporary moment of relentless demolition and displacement, it is not the dead who haunt buildings, but buildings that preserve the trace of the living who have moved on.