I have always had a desire to create, underscored by a deep curiosity to understand the world around me. Language and visual mediums have become my tools for doing that. They gave me somewhere to place feelings I didn’t always know how to articulate – or maybe didn’t want to.

Growing up between cultures, being half Chinese, part Romanian and Polish, yet born in the United States and raised in Hong Kong, a sense of identity has always felt abstract to me. I moved often and rarely felt like I belonged in one place. Instead, I became an observer. I watched how other families interacted, how the other kids played together, a voyeur in the world of ‘ordinary’. I romanticized the everyday and found comfort in film and TV, in stories that allowed emotion to be explored fully and reality to exist without restraint.

I was a sensitive and quiet child, and escaping into small worlds became second nature to me. I would build little universes with their own logic and timelines, spaces where everything made sense. That instinct hasn’t left me. I’m still drawn to creating and concepting atmospheres and narratives, to exploring themes of identity, womanhood, and transformation.

Now, studying in Amsterdam, I find myself in a phase of growth. Moving here without knowing the language or the city forced me into a new kind of independence. It also gave me permission to explore more freely, to experiment with film, writing, image making, and to take those mediums seriously. However, I don’t feel near finished or satiated. I feel curious. I feel excited to keep being inspired, to create, to learn and seeing where my instincts will take me.