Make a Friend and Have Hotpot
Make a Friend and Have Hotpot
REEF, LA
February 2025
Medium:
Interactive floor installation; cardboard, 3D body scans, cultural imagery collage, audience participation
REEF, LA
February 2025
Make a Friend and Have Hotpot Make a Friend and Have Hotpot begins with a ring of human-shaped fragments—cardboard bodies curled around a hotpot, waiting to be touched, broken apart, and reimagined. Viewers are not passive observers here. They sit, rotate, stack, hesitate. Each gesture is a tentative invitation: Could this become a friend? Or a stranger made from borrowed pieces?
The blocks are inviting, almost toy-like, yet uncanny in texture. Covered in collaged scans of the artist’s own body—flesh turned pattern, limbs turned puzzle—they blend with imagery of lion dances, cats, astronauts, and boiling broth. Domestic symbols float alongside cultural mythos, forming a surreal intimacy. The work plays with discomfort and delight. It asks: What happens when we encounter another body? Do we recognize it as a coherent self or a shifting configuration of signs, symbols, and fragments? What does a relationship become when closeness is constructed from collage and projection?
In Lacanian terms, every act of recognition is a misrecognition—a projected imaginary coherence over symbolic gaps. These bodies are not whole, nor broken. They are rehearsals. What we construct is not truth, but structure. What we reach for is not a person, but a fantasy of intimacy—performed through touch.
This is not just a sculpture. It is a social experiment disguised as a game—a gentle, disarming space to practice connection in an era of algorithmic identities and curated proximity.
REEF, LA
February 2025