Chinamaxxing

I ♥ CHINA is a heat-sensitive mug that reveals its slogan only when filled with hot water, a Chinamaxxing “wellness hack” associated with “becoming Chinese.” Borrowing the visual grammar of I ♥ NY, the slogan compresses attachment to China into a compact, consumable form. As the water cools, the image fades; like an online trend, it persists only while attention and energy sustain it. A QR code turns the reveal into a short, platform-ready fragment detached from the full physical experience.

This is a prototype for an artifact called last name, CHAN, a physical language puzzle built from a modified white Rubik’s Cube. Red fragments of the Chinese character 陳 and the Burmese word ချမ်း are distributed across its rotating surfaces. The puzzle begins with a cultural misunderstanding: 陳 is pronounced Chén in Mandarin and commonly romanized as Chan in Cantonese. The surname comes historically from the ancient State of Chen, while the character can also mean “to display,” “to state,” or “to explain.”
In Burmese, ချမ်း literally means “to be cold,” while related words suggest peace, calm, and comfort or, in my interpretation, being cool and having swag ( kinda ) . A Chinese reader may recognize one side of the puzzle and a Burmese reader may recognize another. Solving last name , CHAN invites different Chans regardless of nationality to translate, connect, and complete the artifact together.“Chan” appears across at least five distinct naming traditions around the world. The spelling alone cannot tell you someone’s nationality or who they are. If it remains confusing, perhaps another Chan can explain.

Tea Tray Synthesizer turns a gongfu tea tray into a musical instrument. Touching its copper rungs, pouring water, and setting down a cup shape its sound. Visitors are invited to sit together and share tea, turning the gestures of tea preparation into an improvised composition.

In 2017, I did my first solo manufacturing project in Shenzhen and ended up becoming friends with "the factory" that made 2,000 bicycle helmets for me. One of my longest conversations was with a woman my age named Ava who worked there. These are random snippets of two years of our WeChat conversations, where product specs are interwoven with our personal lives. Shared with permission! We're still in touch.

Body Oracle is an interactive speculative language system that transforms bodily poses and relationships into AI-generated characters, inspired by Chinese oracle-bone inscriptions. Presented through an evolving digital archive and a handheld mixed-reality mask, the work imagines an alternative language for proprioception and embodied communication. It brings ancient pictographic logic into dialogue with contemporary technology, asking how cultural forms can be translated across bodies, histories, and borders.

For this performance, the artist and a Unitree Go2 Quadruped are enclosed together inside of a dog crate for an extended period of time.

Pigeon Drone examines the conspiracy theory that “Birds Aren’t Real,” using the pigeon as a symbolic nexus of capitalism, surveillance, and technological anxiety. Based on a real 2023 incident in India, where police detained a pigeon, for 8 months, suspected of foreign espionage after finding Chinese script on its body, the sculpture explores how images of China travel through global media and become entangled with conspiracy, militarization, and technological fantasy.

Tributary is an interactive installation where visitors choose between conventional and fish-in-the-fields rice farming, then watch water clarity, CO₂, and biodiversity data respond in real time as the rice yield is dispensed: reliably abundant for one path, unpredictable for the other. It asks whether we must choose between controlling nature and living in harmony with it, and who bears the cost of abundance.

Made in China is a single-channel video performance in which I repeatedly apply ordinary “Made in China” product labels to my own face. I treat the label as a statement of fact: a recognition of the cultural environment, language, and social defaults that shaped me. It is not about pride, shame, or belonging.

The earliest written record of gunpowder is a safety warning.

Around 850 CE, Daoist alchemists chasing an elixir of immortality heated sulfur and saltpeter; the flames burned their hands and faces and brought down their houses. A three-line poem from Inference hangs between that warning and the first known recipe (1044 CE), conspicuously not asking what else could be ignited in our search for immortality.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, many sociopolitical issues became even more apparent, including government officials’ tendency to dodge responsibility and shift blame. This exposed problems in our sociopolitical systems and contributed to the pandemic’s spread. In Chinese, this act is called “甩锅,” which literally means “tossing a pan.” As this comedy played out between central and local governments in China, the US, and elsewhere, I created Toss Pan Dance to inform, criticize, and warn us not to lose sight of accountability amid politicians’ own “toss pan dance.”

At a time of social distancing and self-quarantine, Toss Pan Dance also offered a way to exercise at home without a gym, with the equipment right in your kitchen! The music was made by typing China’s No. 3 Document (三号文), with the letters abcdefg on a Mac keyboard mapped to 1234567 on a piano keyboard. The document prohibited the release of pathogen testing and experimental results without authorization. I saw it as legitimizing the very evasion of responsibility the dance criticized.

The dance quickly went viral in China and was reposted on influential blogs, receiving over 1 million hits in a single day. Huang Hung, “the Oprah of China,” used the dance to explain “Toss Pan” in her TED Talk, “How American and Chinese values shaped the coronavirus response.”

"Those who know the Chinese characters are right to believe that it will become a universal character, whose written form would be understood by all the world…" (Leibniz)

Leibniz saw in Chinese characters a way of writing that designates things directly, and dreamed of a universal symbolism a machine could compute. These works take up his dream and treat Chinese characters, the oldest writing system still in daily use, not as fixed signs but as living material. Through computation, characters are assembled from their strokes, read by machines, set loose as the creatures they name , and returned to nature, asking what writing becomes when it can move, think and decay.

Lineage Holder maps social media footage of Chinese uncles and aunties practicing qigong in public spaces onto a gongfucha tea set made of marijuana pipe-glass by glassblower Guy Moore. The tea set, "alchemy I," was released as a limited edition of 24 by Guy Moore and Kelsey Chen in 2026. Lineage Holder explores tea as a primary material / medium through which the West exercised a political imagination of the East as a spiritual and cultural alternative to the crises of modernity. From the 1960's countercultural movement to the present Chinamaxxing phenomenon; tea, Eastern esoteric traditions, and Chinese civilization itself have been enlisted as idealized foils to the West in the West's own search for political alternatives. The piece observes the revival of tea culture in the West as an expression of utopian longing and political critique in an era of polycrisis and profound political / institutional failure.

The works manipulate online images of Wendi Deng Murdoch and merge them with awkward English phrases from the artist's childhood albums, produced by the type of photography studios many Chinese children visited yearly. A controversial businesswoman, art patron, Rupert Murdoch's ex-wife, and rumoured spy, Murdoch is often read through the lens of the American Dream and Chinese ambition, while claimed and disowned by both.

This hand-stitched zine manual and accompanying installation tray reaches for Chinamaxxing from all the distance, awkwardness and grief of queer diaspora. Piecing together questions, mixed media artifacts and poems — Ip and Wong explore imperfection, not knowing, and trying as ways to yearn for closeness to place and identity. What is the practice of being seen as Chinese sometimes but not always, what is the recognition we desire from loved ones or strangers? How can we consider a political analysis of this phenomenon? The notes and questions contained in this piece will become scores for the performance they will create in response to the show.

*** Please join us for their live performance event at the show’s closing on October 17. Some public rehearsals may occur during open gallery hours

有机械者必有机事，
有机事者必有机心。
机心存于胸中，则纯白不备；
纯白不备，则神生不定；
神生不定者，道之所不载也。

《庄子·外篇·天地》

Where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way will cease to buoy you up.

Zhuangzi, "Heaven and Earth" (Outer Chapters, ~3rd c. BCE), trans. Burton Watson

Butterfly Chronicles (蝶生纪) is a hand-drawn animated work inspired by Ancient Songs of the Miao, an oral epic of the Miao people of southwest China. The story describes the emergence of the Butterfly Mother from a maple tree and the birth of all living beings through twelve eggs incubated by the Jiyu Bird.

Using watercolor, traditional Miao embroidery inspired imagery, the work unfolds as a cyclical narrative in which the ending returns to the beginning. The animation reimagines an ancient myth through a contemporary, hand-crafted visual language.

Music: 天童《立冬》- 未来东方厂牌

Neon has long been part of the urban cityscape, transforming language into light and turning commercial signs into visual symbols of modernity, desire, and fantasy. This work is a neon installation of the traditional Chinese character “夢” (dream), flickering at an irregular frequency. Suspended between language, imagery, and light, the character represents a dream rendered in the material language of contemporary technology. The piece brings traditional text into a contemporary technological medium, opening questions around cultural memory, translation, desire, and the ways images of China are imagined and circulated across borders. Its flickering, dysfunction, and moments of breakdown suggest a dream that is unstable and incomplete, one that is continually being formed, interrupted, and reconstructed through acts of translation and projection.

A burnt cardboard horse scented with lavender. Alluding to André Aciman’s essay On Lavender and Longing, the work explores longing for an imagined future or a self that does not yet exist.

I was born in a Year of the Horse; 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse, symbolizing rapid transformation. Charging toward self-reinvention, the horse burns bright at the risk of burning out. Visitors can place their heads inside its hollow body, invoking the Trojan horse: a vessel for the unwelcome parts of our present selves we wish to leave behind.

a playable digital archive of QZone (QQ空间) decorations, collecting 5,851 files from between 2005 and 2009, including skins, pendants, floaties, cursors, title bars and flash music players.

QZone is the personal-homepage platform Tencent launched in 2005. At its peak it had over 600 million monthly active users, making it the largest social network in China at the time. For a generation it was the first page of their own, and what Y2K maximalism and Fei Zhu Liu ("non-mainstream") looked like on the Chinese internet.

The QZone Museum is designed and built by viola he, who first learned html through QZone and blogbus.

Ritual as Method examines the contemporary revival and mediation of Chinese ritual culture, from Hanfu and immersive “palace banquet” experiences to their circulation through digital media. Through research, images, and video, the work explores how ritual is translated, reconstructed, and reimagined across cultural contexts.

Inner Carbon is a 3D platform puzzle game that infuses Daoist cosmological knowledge into a speculative climate biotechnology future. Inspired by the rediscovered 19th century engraving of the "Chart of the Inner Landscape"--a somatic meditation diagram encoding the body as a microcosm of the Way, the work asks how old ways of nature-human correspondence might offer creative, philosophical openings to planetary survival and flourishing.

Sculptures from Shanzhai Remix 山寨合集 cast 3D-scanned Taobao knockoffs (bags, sneakers, toys, electronics) in resin, fused into hybrid forms. Made when shanzhai stood for Western fears of Chinese copying, the work reads it as vernacular design: fast, adaptive, meme-like. In the age of Chinamaxxing, what was dismissed as counterfeit culture now describes how every image model is trained. When culture travels and comes back altered, is that admiration, appropriation, or invention? And who decides?

Being human is exhausting. Time to go flat.

Turn your selfie into “mouse jerky”: a tiny, flattened you, ready for a holiday. Inspired by Chinese internet slang, where 鼠 (“mouse”) playfully replaces 死 (“death”) in expressions like “dead tired,” the club gives youthful exhaustion a ridiculous little body.

Step in front of the webcam, strike a pose, and choose an outfit. Rotate, stretch, and play with your mouse, then take a photo together and save it for your next adventure.

Here, going flat means 躺平 (lying flat)—stepping away from the pressure to constantly achieve. Even if you can’t take a break, your mouse can.