How did you start making jewelry?

I was always very artsy. I went to an arts high school that kind of exhausted my joy in painting and traditional arts because that's all we did, so I just became more interested in design. I used to make myself dumb, wire-wrapped beaded jewelry. I actually applied to every college as a fashion [major] but I decided that I didn't really like that industry, so the closest thing was jewelry. It's smaller scale — less pressure is what it seemed like. It was also something that I hadn't learned before, because you don't [usually] have pieces of metal and learn to solder by yourself. It's mostly the design aspect, the functionality of jewelry, that I'm very interested in. It's very satisfying to have a product that you can wear.

That’s very true. In the context of the pieces you did for your senior thesis, which explored identity, do you think that functionality lent something unique that more traditional mediums would not have?

I think because it has so much relation to your body, I can use that to my advantage, because you feel things with your body, you move through space with your body. So the interaction between your [body and the] space is the same as the color of your skin in the space. But other than that, I didn't really see the connection at first because I was super struggling with how to incorporate my interest in social issues with making an impact with my love of craft, because they seemed so disconnected.

Was there a moment when everything clicked for you?

It was my junior year when [my work] was super technique-based, it wasn't really conceptual. There was this take-out box that I made for a chasing and repoussé project and I was like: Actually, this box represents so much in Chinese American culture. Like, it kind of represents my identity in a way — this fake Chinese box for fake Chinese food. It's American but it's the thing most commonly associated with Chinese culture, so I kind of went in the route of literal objects that Chinese Americans have connections to, [in the realm of] childhood, nostalgia and stuff like that. That was the moment that it clicked, like, Why don't I do more with significant objects in [Chinese American] households?

