What Water Left Behind

Soy bean sheets, cotton, edamame, sea salt 

Commissioned by Huangyan Intangible Heritage Museum, 2026

As the soybean travels across oceans, it adapts to survive wherever it lands and evolves into new forms of nourishment. Yet, it is water that quietly guides this transformation. Whether the bean is crushed into soy milk, boiled to lift delicate sheets of tofu skin, pressed into yielding tofu, or left to slowly ferment into soy sauce, it must first be united with water. Water carries the local terroir and holds onto a liquid memory of the land it flows from. What Water Left Behind traces these journeys, asking what endures once the water evaporates and its memory of the land disappears. 

Hanging softly in the room is a delicate tapestry made of tofu skins, carefully hand-stitched together. These skins form naturally as hot soy milk warms and evaporates. They trace the exact movement of the liquid, freezing the gentle rhythm of the water in place. The thread doesn't just hold the material together— it physically binds the pieces of a much larger story about displacement and moving on. 

Right beside it sit three sustainable darkroom prints which capture the waters just off the coast of Taizhou, Zhejiang. This coastline holds an intense history of displacement. Here, an entire community once crossed the strait in quiet grief, carrying the sudden weight of knowing they might never return.

This physical displacement mirrors a deep personal loss. The very chemistry holding these images together is intimate: they were developed using a solution made from edamame pods, remnants of a meal the artist’s family shared while mourning a loved one. In transforming this shared meal into photographs, a quiet personal grief is woven into the collective sorrow of the landscape.

These images undergo their own transformations. Having been soaked in the sea water of Taizhou, the prints continuously absorb and release moisture. This water carries the same salt and weight as human tears. As it evaporates, it leaves behind a brittle crust of salt crystals echoing both the saline of the ocean and the quiet sorrow of the developer itself.

We naturally focus on the materials we can touch. Yet, What Water Left Behind is eventually a map of what vanishes and what endures. The ocean may appear constant in the images, but the work is truly shaped by the water that is no longer there. As the water evaporates, everything left behind—the hand-stitched soy membrane, the salt crystals, and the traces of a mourning family meal— becomes the residue of memory and loss.