Oil on canvas ( work in progress)

The following works were developed over the three years I lived in Beijing. They explored experiences of estrangement, which I felt upon realizing that everyday elements of the Chinese context were unfamiliar to me, while the reverse was also true: objects that were intimate to me were not easily understood there. These paintings were developed as a small notebook of this process of estrangement. This research began in a porcelain class, where, as the only non-Chinese student, I noticed that no one recognized the function of a butter dish—an item absent from the local food culture but widely sold on Chinese platforms with non-obvious uses (as a jewelry holder, dessert container, or decorative piece). This sense of estrangement led me to engage with Freud’s concept of Unheimlich, the coexistence of the strange and the familiar, while also reflecting on my own process of colonization as I identified Eurocentric objects as part of my culture.