SEE MEMORY - PBS PREMIERE MAY 2025

SEE MEMORY is about the power of memory in our lives and how traumatic memories can prevent us from living fully in the present and envisioning our futures. The film offers a roadmap for changing our relationship to memory and regaining hope and agency. SEE MEMORY is made out of 30,000 hand painted stills that accompanies narration from interviews with leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists.

“SEE MEMORY is a stunning dramatization of the complexity and emotional power of human memory. The film offers nothing short of an entirely new way of imagining memory, trauma, presentness, and emotional experience.”

R. John Williams, Associate Professor, English, Film and Media, Yale University

Selected paintings made for SEE MEMORY

Selected stop motion animations made for SEE MEMORY

Time Away from Time - Art Basel Miami

I was born in Hong Kong and went to kindergarten at a small British elementary school. In first grade, my teacher Mrs. Whitaker admonished me to stop daydreaming. She told the class that my mouth was wide open while I was lost in thought and that a fly would fly in any minute. At that moment I snapped out of it and made sure to keep my mouth firmly closed. But I have never lost that tendency to drift off to a place that seems to me “time away from time.”

As an artist and filmmaker I’ve devoted my life to exploring that world. It’s a world of memories, dreams and imagination. My work has taken me inside the labs of brilliant neuroscientists who are discovering vital connections between our ability to imagine, remember and plan for our futures. It turns out that:

“Imagination is an essential launchpad for our hopes and dreams.” 

Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., Psychiatrist 

Today, the studio where I create my moving paintings are my portals to that state of mind. As described to me by neuroscientist Daniela Schiller,

“Memory is a form of time travel to the past. Imagination can be a form of travel not bound to any time.”

Daniela Schiller, Ph.D., Director of the Schiller Lab at the Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine

I have come a long way from being that kid who was told not to daydream. In fact I cannot do my work without frequent and fluid access to that form of mental travel. This installation connects my exploration of the science of imagination expressed through art to Pinktada’s launch at the Esme Hotel, a property with a rich history as a former Artist Colony, a place where misfits and daydreamers came to create.

Memory Without Walls

Memory Without Walls premiered at Berlin Art Week, 2022 with the Mauer Exhibition; a project which “invites you to reimagine the Berlin wall.”

Artist Statement

When I began to research life in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I wondered what I might have done if I had been trapped in East Germany. I imagined that I would have been too afraid to make a move. I became fascinated by the daring and imaginative ways people found to escape, and decided to focus on two escapes in particular for this piece.

The escape in a hot air balloon in 1979 orchestrated by Hans Strelczyk and Gunter Wetzel and their wives and children. Eight people crossed the border to West Germany in a homemade hot air balloon.

East German acrobat Horst Klein escaped on a “tightrope” in early 1963. Klein turned an unused high-tension cable that stretched over the wall into a tightrope over the wall.

People who suffer from PTSD cannot access their imagination when remembering a trauma. Because of this their traumatic memories remain stuck. Psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk explains in his book The Body Keeps the Score:

 “When compulsively pulled back to the past without imagination, there is no hope. Imagination is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true.”

I wanted to tap into this idea of human creativity in the face of repression. There's this seemingly impenetrable wall, but the tightrope and hot air balloon escapees did not try to directly confront it, they floated above and swung over it.  

When we can't solve a problem, we often say “I'm hitting my head against a wall.”  We all get stuck and are held back by mental and emotional walls. What enables us to get past our inner walls is our ability to think outside the box and approach a problem creatively in unexpected ways.

I thought of the massive weight of the wall and the lightness of imagination and hope. I love the idea of the whimsy and lightness of imagination removing this heavy obstacle. Our minds are so powerful that we can solve seemingly impenetrable problems.  

Memory Without Walls explores how we can break through the traumatic walls of memory with imagination. Imagination is the launchpad for hopes and dreams for our futures. Living within the confines of traumatic memories limits what we are able to plan for our futures. Freeing traumatic memories and melding them with imagination opens up a new way of dreaming, thinking and living. 

Artistic Process

The project is comprised of three paintings, a short film and animated NFTs. Using archival photographs and footage as a point of departure, I created 24,000 painting stills and edited them down to approximately 15,000, which I put into motion at 30/fps to create the animation. Method and meaning are intertwined as the images start as “realistic” and merge with imagination in paintings that drip, layer and transform, a metaphor for the way we remember and merge memory with imagination.