Barbie

2024

Photography (Cooked rice and mold fungi)

11x16 inches

 

This series explores how manufacturing, exportation, and the global economy shape the identity of a place on both macro and micro levels.

 

A made-in-Hong Kong Barbie doll serves as a capsule of colonial times in the 1960s, when Hong Kong transitioned into a global hub for plastic manufacturing, displacing the region's history of rice cultivation and export.

 

I grew up playing with Barbie dolls, which unconsciously shaped my early perceptions of body, race, and sexuality in profound and complex ways.

I remake the Barbie using rice, coloring it with fungi, an invasive material, to challenge its original form and cultural symbolism.