What I Carried / Where I Went

In My Brain and NY, the artist transforms self-portraiture into a visual inventory of identity. Rather than presenting a single, fixed image of herself, she repeats and reduces her figure, allowing each successive version to reveal another layer of the person behind the portrait.

In My Brain, the decreasing scale of the figures exposes a playful map of the artist’s inner world. Art, music, fashion, food, and travel accumulate above her face like compartments of an expanding mind. As the physical self becomes smaller, the ideas become more numerous. The final revelation, “That’s Me”, suggests that identity exists not simply in appearance, but in the collection of passions, experiences, and obsessions carried within.

NY extends this visual language from the psychological to the geographical. Repeated self-portraits are embedded within images of New York architecture, taxis, streets, and directional markers. Here, place becomes another form of self-portrait. The city is not merely a background; it is part of the artist’s construction of memory and identity. As the portraits diminish, the pathways above them lengthen, creating the sensation of looking backward through an increasingly distant past.

Presented together as What I Carried / Where I Went, the works ask a deceptively simple question: What remains when the physical objects and places surrounding a life begin to disappear?

The answer is quietly embedded in both pieces. We carry forward what shaped us, our passions, our memories, the places we inhabited, and the selves we became along the way.