Defense Date
2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
Photography and Film
First Advisor
Tesora Molina-Garcia
Second Advisor
Mark Boulos
Third Advisor
Mary Beth Reed
Fourth Advisor
Michelle Yee
Abstract
In this dissertation, I explore memory, diaspora, labor, and intergenerational trauma through constructed photography and experimental film. Informed by Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space, I examine how identity is shaped through displacement, cultural negotiation, and inherited memory. Drawing from my relationship with my grandmother and my experience as a Chinese woman living in diaspora, I consider labor as both survival and care, tracing how domestic gestures and emotional structures continue across generations. Through collage, reconstruction, and animation, I rework fragments of family archives, colonial landscape imagery, and personal photographs to address grief, racialized perception, belonging, and the visibility of Asian femininity. My experimental film Until We Meet Again combines ritual, speculative narrative, and analogue processes to approach absence and memory across time and distance. Across this dissertation, image-making becomes a way for me to construct an “elsewhere,” where loss, migration, and identity remain open and continuously in formation.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-7-2026