I was born in Hong Kong. In 1965 I moved to Toronto and spent the next 19 years studying and working at the University of Toronto. I have lived in Sydney since the mid-1980s.

After graduating with a degree in applied mathematics, I went on to complete postgraduate studies, first in public health (MSc), then in criminology/law (MA, PhD). For more than four decades, I have been an academic sociologist at UNSW, researching a variety of topics including policing, occupational culture, creativity, and technology.

Even though as a child I have always been interested in drawing, it took many years before I summoned the courage to go to art school. I obtained my MFA in 2009 at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. I also completed a graduate certificate in media arts and production at UTS. In recent years, I have been focusing on integrating my art practice with poetry writing.

My practice is quite varied. Here are some examples:

Lecture-performance / Performance art

The lecture-performance is emerging as an important form of art practice: it combines features of the academic lecture with those of an artistic performance. An example of my work in this genre is Mapping Crises–Visualising Hope, performed at the SEA Foundation in Tilburg, the Netherlands in 2017.

Increasingly I am drawn to the corporeal nature of some types of performance art. An example is my 200km walk in 2019 following the steps of Chinese miners in the 1850s who walked from Robe, SA to Ballarat, VIC to resist a discriminatory tax on Chinese immigrants.

Digital images, sounds, text and videos

I have experimented with the manipulation of digital images, sounds, text and videos. Examples include my MFA work Mounting Evidence: Traces of Things to Come (2008) and my video My Data, My Self (2016).

Poetry

I have always loved the power of poetry in creating new realities with usually very few words. This is now my favourite art form. I have also started to play with visual, sound and collaborative poetry.

Hand-made images

I haven’t forgotten my original fascination with drawing, painting and other hand-made images. I am experimenting with paper-cuts, a form of Chinese folk art, as well as weaving with paper and plant materials. Examples include works shown in the exhibitions at AIRspace Projects gallery in 2020 and 2021.