Ma X SOPHIE is a real-time 3D environment that explores the interplay between preservation and deterioration. Modelled in Blender, assembled in Unreal Engine, and finalized in Premiere Pro, the piece features a decimated 3D scan of my mother (Má) from a 3rd person perspective within an blank environment devoid of a point of reference. Ma's body showcases visible points of deterioration, symbolising the unreliable nature of attempts at preservation - whether through the digital or through memory.

The video features SOPHIE's track "XTC Acid".

After Hours is a real-time 3D environment that offers a first-person perspective of a 90s-style Hong Kong restaurant through the eyes of a mouse. The player is free to navigate the space, and from the mouse’s perspective, the restaurant appears distorted and imposing through scale. The restaurant was constructed from personal and found 3D scans of objects, textures, and architecture. In doing so, the space does not represent a restaurant in particular, but becomes a tapestry of our fragmented diasporas, stitched together through shared experiences, echoing how Chinatown has gathered our scattered cultures & identities into one resilient whole, however fragile. We view Chinatown as a site of both refuge and resistance; Beneath the flashy signage, particular trinkets, and overflowing menus, lies a space where cultural practices may persist, and in which language, food, and racialized communities seek continuity across generations. However, we are further troubled by the erosion of such spaces due to gentrification, commodification, and westernization. The player, a mouse, takes on our position within these spaces: it does not solely observe, but it lives within the space, on its margins and its textures, surviving in the spaces left behind. Its position posits what it means to exist within fading spaces; To burrow in memory, scavenge from loss, and to remain in the face of erasure.

This project finds interest in the poetics of decay. The environment embraces imperfection through visible seams, gaps in scans, and uncorrected textural glitches. Making space for these visual fractures highlights the fragmented nature of cultural memory and the impossibility of its pure preservation across generations within the Western sphere. Players are invited to exist temporarily in a space that is imagined yet real, built from collective memory. Via this render, we explore what it means to inherit and pass on cultures previously shaped by migration and loss. After Hours is ultimately a reclamation and a meditation on disappearance, on what is lost, what is remembered, and how it is “re-membered” in the process.

Con đã quên mất rồi embraces a surrealist approach to memory, presenting relics of my childhood bedroom in an open, natural setting — grass, flowers, and hills — devoid of walls, floors, or ceilings. Stripped of its structure, the room dissolves into vast emptiness, mirroring the fragility of memory, where each object becomes a fragment through which I reconstruct my childhood. The video opens on a ceiling fan in motion, surrounded by oversized glowing stars that mimic the glow-in-the-dark stars I had once adorned my ceiling with. The frame gently shifts downwards, revealing a single floating window, followed by a twin bed, bookshelves, a large drawer, and scattered children’s toys amidst patches of grass and wildflowers. As the camera continues moving backwards, the landscape becomes increasingly distorted, emulating the nauseating feeling of revisiting fragmented familiar spaces. The overhead light flickers and briefly shifts colours, bathing the scene in a red light that illustrates the corruption, pervasion, and transgression of the space and of the memory.

This project navigates the tension between nostalgia and nausea, between the desperate need to hold onto memory and the inevitable realization that it is slipping away. The missing walls reflect a deeper lack of foundation — an unsteady, liminal space where personal relics are the only anchors in an otherwise vanishing past. It is a space I cannot seem to leave, yet cannot fully enter; A place between knowing and forgetting, presence and loss. The title, "Con đã quên mất rồi" (I have already forgotten), is a sentence in my mother tongue that reflects not just the forgetting of specific memories, but the emotional distance from a childhood I can no longer fully access. This line encapsulates the grief I feel — an inability to hold onto a past that is gradually fading.

Pérsephone is a 23-second looping sequence that invites viewers into an ephemeral and gentle space that intertwines themes of comfort, nurture, and healing inherently rooted in nature. In the (assumed) beginning, a single mauve three-petaled flower blossoms, revealing a being huddled in its center that unfurls in parallel with the flora surrounding it. Its movements are soft and fluid alongside the petals, symbolizing the rhythms of nature as a guide to the beings it homes. It also highlights one’s ties with the patterns that make up natural elements – growth, rest, and retreat – and cycles of evolution. As the being rests atop the flower, it briefly observes a bug flying by in small looping patterns, which introduces the topic of the fleetingness of distractions that may take form as thoughts and worries that interrupt stillness. However, the briefness of this interaction suggests the acceptance of such distractions and their innate temporality, and thus the ability to return to a harmonious state. The scene is set against a dark starry night sky and is brightly illuminated by distant blue moonlight. The moon – often associated with femininity and motherhood – bathes the being that in turn reflects its light in shimmering silver, evoking the comforting, illuminating, and unwavering presence of motherly figures. Eventually, the flower comes to a gradual close and encloses the being in a protective manner, further bridging nature and motherhood, and reinforcing the concept of the cyclical care characteristic of both.

The sound design of Persephone incorporates samples from FKA Twigs’ Mary Magdalene, Grimes’ Hallways, and Eartheater’s Milky Way, all of which create an ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere. The delicate, haunting textures and soft vocals enhance the themes of comfort, fluidity, and cyclical renewal in the animation.