Joshua Tree Highlands Residency

January to March 2025, Joshua Tree, California, USA.

This is a two months artist residency in the Californian Mojave high desert reserve at the entrance of the Joshua Tree National Park. The facility is equipped with a living quarter, studio workspace, library, and an extensive rural natural reserve. The residency hosts a writer and artist with a cohesive theme of different practice. My residency cohort was Remy Barnes, a writer and professor at the University of Southern California. At the end of the residency, we hosted an open studio event with a week long public access to the gallery space to view my piece.

I brought my own copper plates prepped for etching with hard ground wax. I also brought my small press that I mounted to a heavy studio table.

Click here to view the complete work.

For 6 weeks I broke down the yucca fibre as much as possible. I repeated break it down by hand to speed up the process.

Each piece is assembled together to create the installation structure.

I had the pleasure to meet and visual interview by drawing portraits of the Taiwanese American elders at Taiwan Centre in Los Angeles. As they tell me stories of the Taiwanese human rights movement, I sketch portraits of them on Taiwanese kozo paper with my own pine charcoal graphite.

Copy of historical documents were on display in the human rights movement gallery at the Taiwan Centre. Most of the original documents were donated to the National Human Rights Foundation in Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Tainan in Taiwan.

Thanks to the generous support of