"Native Sun" (2023) emerged as I sought to retrieve my Hakka Chinese identity. My family is from a people group called the Hakka, who purportedly fanned out from central China after AD 200. They sought refuge on already claimed land in southern China and were referred to as “Guest families” “客家” by the Cantonese (transliterated as “Hakka”). The ancestral homeland is irretrievably lost, swallowed up by the passing of time. The slur “guests”, which was a backhanded nicety, was also internalized as identity.

I recognize that my few surviving common experiences with my ancestors who lived in that ancestral homeland a millennia ago is the experience of the celestial bodies. I realized that the same sun presided over our existences across time and on various lands we found ourselves on. Through the movement of the sun, we received the same sense of passing time and orientation on the land. Our bodily rhythms are regulated and in rhythm with it. We relished in its heat and light on a winter day. We craned our necks in wonder and in fear at its eclipse.

"Native Sun" records my attempts at capturing and manipulating the sun and its light, by refracting it with water and filtering its light through my flesh. Photographs of the sun are animated by gesture in VR to weave the story of ancestry encoded in my body into the work. Working in screens and pixels, which are really humanity’s attempts at duplicating the sun, the digital medium becomes a vessel for longing for reconnection through the sun, albeit an artificial one.