A Deep Dive into Ancestral Aestheticism
An art practice emerged from a spiritual practice, creating immersion that’s neither loud nor big, and time-based storytelling when played out spatially.
In October 2025 I was invited to participate in the upcoming House of Tarot show as a part of the larger Imboc Festival in Detroit, happening at the first weekend of February 2026.
Imbolc is a pagan festival celebrating the midpoint between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox - the planted seed that is yet to sprout but nonetheless growing. House of Tarot is an ongoing series of immersive art installations, where each participating artist receives a Tarot card as a prompt for their installation. After a wildly successful showing of Major Aracanas in the spring of 2025, the organizers were joining forces with Imbolc Festival for a second iteration showcasing additional Minor Arcana artists. I was graciously invited to join the cohort of Minor Arcana artists.
My installation was a room-scale journey through four “stations”. Each station is its own miniature world made of various natural and found materials, and miniature human figures. The stations are connected through a path parsed through sand.
This was my answer to the card that called my name - Four of Swords - the only card in the action-driven house of swords that signifies a pause, a rest, a recuperation. The card speaks to me deeply, but more on that later.
When the organizers of House of Tarot first approached me, I was slowly and gently coming back to a creative practice, after a hiatus of almost 8 years, drowning in demanding fulltime jobs and a chaotic city life. One of the first things I made, when returning to creating, were these child-like drawings with ink pen and colored pencil, depicting scenes I saw when I meditated. Never was I a drawer; even as a child, words were my creative medium rather than doodles. However, they say God is a Gift of Desperation - in my most creatively desperate moments, God came knocking on my door bringing a gift basket of sketchbooks and pencils.
The meditation scenes granted me a sort of spiritual access I had never had before. I first started having these visuals in 2024 following Tara Brach’s RAIN meditation. These scenes kept on visiting me during meditations, vividly and ever-evolving, depicting a different environment and a story with child figures every time. The environment varied and so did the children. Sometimes we are in the desert, other times we are moving through the forest. Every time, the nature I saw was grand, and the figures tiny. At first there was one - I call him Baby, floating in the ocean holding tightly onto my heart like a fetus; then there was Fire, hiding in her cave from the rest of the world with a layer of fire she had set around her as protection; and then there was Rock, the smallest of them all, yet carrying a rock disproportionally large to their tiny body through the woods. It quickly became clear to me that these child figures I saw were indeed versions of myself.
Over the following months and years, the children evolved and their relationships changed. Isolated in their own worlds at first, eventually they began to journey through the worlds as a team. They also met other spirits and figures along the way, some a little scary, others offered divine protection.
I continued drawing not only the scenes that I saw, but also myself meditating, experimenting with the gestures I had developed to accompany my meditations and prayers.
Each artist, for House of Tarot, is asked to design our own version of the card we had received. The design I had submitted for Four of Swords was hand-drawn using the now familiar tools of ink pens and colored pencils, featuring the mini-versions of myself meditating/sending prayers, and a pair of open palms that are both seeking and returning with answers. The palms anchor the image as my “fourth sword”.
The meaning of “resting” and “pausing” of this card speak to me deeply, however, at this point I wasn’t yet sure what the installation was going to be other than the aim to create a spiritual shelter, a resting place for the audience, a place to exhale.
The idea of creating sculptural versions of my drawings struck me when I finally saw the space at the Boyer Campbell building. As one enters my assigned room from the hallway, the eye naturally falls to the focal point of the room - the corner in a diagonal position to the entrance. This corner felt like a “destination”. I wanted to create a journey that leads the audience through the room and eventually to this destination.
Now, I have never had the opportunity to create a room-scale installation before, apart from my college thesis from 12 years ago which had no sculptural element, but 3 walls of a room projected with videos. Despite Sculpture being one of my favorite classes in college, the creative mediums that drew me in had always been somewhat time-based: videos, performance, VR worlds, DJing. I love telling a story over a period of time, as that is my way of engaging with my audience’s presence fully. In a world full of 15-seconds of information, I find it endearing to ask for someone’s time. When applying this instinct to a physical room, it felt right to create a “path” that leads my audience through these worlds of mine.
What about the materials? Because of the spiritual nature of this work and building upon my pen-and-paper practice, I wanted to further challenge myself, as a digitally-trained artist, to create an installation with only handmade materials. In the weeks prior to the show, I began a rapid crash course on materials I had never touched before: clay, styrofoam, acrylic, papier maché… It was a fun and inspiring time. It is also worth noting that some of the anchoring materials of my installation: the bricks, the tree trunks, the sand, etc. were either supplied, without hesitation, by other participating artists at the show or found on the streets of Detroit. I was moved by this act of support from Detroit’s people, and inspired by the sense of freedom from the city.
Why miniature worlds? In the past I had been accustomed to making big, sometimes loud statements to create a sense of immersion. When provided with the spaciousness of this corner room, my mind shifted to the other end of the spectrum - if I create objects that are as small as possible, arguably it creates a sense of immersion even more effectively as it draws you to look in closer. In particular, it was important to me that there was a distinct contrast between the size of the tiny human figures and the big environment surrounding them.
Prior to making these artistic decisions, I was barely aware of the ancestral connection behind my aesthetic preference. When scrolling on Etsy for home decor one day, my feed decided to show me scrolls of ancient Chinese paintings of mountain landscape, 山水画, as we call it in Chinese which literally means “paintings of mountains and waters”. It struck me then that the atmosphere I was trying to depict had (of course) been done by my ancestors, which had well influenced my own aesthetics - the contrast between big natural landscape and small human figures, the lack of singular perspective 散点透视, the intentionally left blank spaces as a way to express the unnamed, the clever use of materials and composition to guide your eyes through a journey, and the vivid and fascinating storytelling behind it all… Despite the differences in medium and in the flavor of the landscape, it was exactly the same atmosphere I was aiming to create with both my drawings and my installation.
The showing of this work was a beautiful experience. People who chose to spend time with my worlds were rewarded with the discovery of these miniature human figures, and were left wondering about their stories. For the tiny parts of me that had been in hiding to be observed upon closely was both extremely vulnerable and simultaneously relieving. What a feeling it is to be seen.
After the closing of the show, my curiosity drove me to more research. I was moved to find out that, just like me, on the other side of this world and many centuries ago, my ancestors had found serenity among the mountains as well. In a book about Chinese art I found in my local bookstore’s used section, British art historian Mary Tregear said:
Mountains as a subject appealed in China for many, almost inherent, reasons. Taoist beliefs can be expressed in landscape, and particularly in what mountains evoke: the remote, the eternal, an overpowering sense of scale when they are related to human beings. All these aspects became part of the Chinese painter’s concern, part of that elusive quality of “life” or “breath” [...] In choosing landscape as their major theme, painters were doing no more than seeking to express, as directly as possible, the very ancient Chinese belief in the unity of man and nature.
Whether perceived so or not, to me, much more of this installation was profoundly Chinese. As an immigrant finding their way back to their ancestors, the process of making this work felt like a grandma’s embrace with a gentle “welcome home”. The consideration of lights and colors, the incorporation of the Chinese Five Elements 五行, and the innate spiritual connection I discovered about the Chinese literature classic Journey to the West 西游记... Perhaps more stories for the next time. :)