I Look Them in the Eye When They Say Hi to Insult Me, 2025

Linocut on Canvas
70x160cm

[…] Sometimes I let myself be attacked. There is a sense of purity you can only achieve by confronting what you despise or reject. Cleaning the dust from the most hidden corner of your room. Looking back at a lost friendship. Replying to an old unread message. Not hiding my vulnerability in the streets. Looking into their eyes when they say hi to insult me. I dip my finger into the ripples they make. I wait for them to step into me. Then I feel myself – more intimate with them, more wholesome than ever. […]

Excerpted from “Intimate Strangers,” a text recently presented in a multilingual reading under the same title, the sentence attempts to subvert the power relations between me and those I had met on the streets. It is not only a refusal to play the game where I take the role as a victim of racism and misogyny, but a liberation from the wariness I internalized as an Asian woman being in Western countries.