Interview by Qimei Fu

Why do you name your new exhibition The Second Seeing ?

For this group of work, I thought about why people put on makeup or put on clothes in certain ways. People behave and live following certain rules because they are observing each other. Then after living in this environment for a long time, people split within themselves another perspective from the outside to restrain themselves. This perspective will let people act or camouflage themselves to fit the environment.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses how a female splits a male's perspective within herself to observe her and judge which way to behave to survive in the patriarchal society. In today's society, all genders live with this second perspective, so I name it The Second Seeing.

I see you always make the photos into installations in several shows. Can you talk about the reason behind it?

I think photography is a media that directly source from reality. The digital camera transforms the source into data, and data return to reality when printed out. For me, just showing the prints hanging on a wall is not enough to reflect the process. That's why I keep experimenting with different ways of the exhibition.

Flashlight is used in most of your work. How did you start to use it?

When I first came to Japan, my Japanese was not so good, so it wasn't easy to communicate with others even though I wanted to. I started to use photography as a tool to communicate. Comparing to take photos without the flashlight, using it feels more aggressive, and the models give more reactions such as feeling surprised, angry, or curious. It gives me a sense of communication, so I keep using it, and it somehow becomes my way of photography.

How did the experience of living a year in Paris affect your artistic practice?

A year in Paris gave me plenty of time to think about my work and figure out some fundamental questions, such as why I took photos.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new project about Gestaltzerfall ( German for "Shape decomposition) with human faces. For example, when people meet others, they will recognize the persons, and if they know each other, they will have the idea of the personality and background of the persons. If I crop out and enlarge a single facial feature like an eye from a photo, the attention will be more on the physical elements like the pupil's color and wrinkles around the eye. I'm using this idea to create a new series. My previous work is very figurative and concrete, and now I want to make something more pure to myself.