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Satellite Baby Sutra
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2025
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Oil, gold ink, incense, joss, indigo-dyed mulberry paper and cotton on canvas
60 in x 20 ft, 9-panel folding screen
This is a reimagined matrilineal heirloom, based on an 11’ embroidery piece my grandmother made for me as a wedding gift when I was twelve. Her piece featured eighteen women, characters from the 18th-century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, engaged in painting, writing, music, incense and tea ceremony. The piece took her nearly two years to stitch by hand. She gifted it to me after I had moved back to the US, following a decade living under her care.
I made this painting as a devotional act. An attempt to transmit love across distance and realms, in a beloved's physical absence. To summon, as a future ancestor, through care labor, a world where my chosen family of diasporic femmes and healers can live in communal abundance.
The panels feature my family, friends and collaborators: Jasmine Narkita Wiley, Kelsey and Hanna Chen, Roula Sharqawe, Janet Wu, Michelle Wu, Ni Feifei, Edo Ighodaro, Wang Yongmei, Jessica Ainooson, Qusay Omran, Natali and Hanna Barakat, Tess Stewart, and Nibha Akireddy.
Satellite Baby Sutra is a sacred text. Unfolding like an accordion book, it transcribes what I know to.be true; ancient poems and sutras carried across great fire walls and embedded into the present, where burnt archives create new rituals of reverence.