“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
— Diane Arbus
A Place to Belong, Pebble Beach, CA, 2025
“A Place to Belong” is a poetic meditation on family, ancestry, and the layered identity of a child not yet born. At the center is a sepia-toned family photograph: a young couple with a cat in the mother's arms, flanked by a watchful grandmother. The cat serves as a symbolic surrogate for the artist as a future child—an almost-mythical presence lingering at the edge of time. The image is wrapped in elements of floral delicacy and domestic history: a blooming orchid and an antique vase, each suggesting cultural inheritance, longing, and the quiet rituals of care. Through this deeply personal composition, the work explores how identity is not only remembered but also imagined, woven from what was, what is, and what was dreamed.
I imagine the moment that photograph was taken: a Sunday afternoon in a courtyard suffused with a warm hush. My grandmother, who lived through two wars, anchors the scene—her presence a reminder that identity is never singular but woven of countless journeys. I imagine myself in the scene, looking straight into the camera, uncertain and curious: a child at the threshold between roots and sky. In that gaze would lie every question I would ever ask about belonging: Who am I when I carry three homelands in my bones? Where does home begin, and where does it end?
This is not a family portrait. It is a lyric composition, a visual poem that refuses to close its final stanza. The edges of the print are scalloped, like waves of memory that lap at the shore of the present, and the blooms seem to grow outward, escaping the confines of time. In this image, past and future entwine, mystery and clarity dance, and my story remains an unfinished manuscript, inviting each viewer to fill in their own stories, to feel the pull of every orchid petal, every curve of the vase, and to ask: where do I find myself in the spaces between?
Artist Statement
"A Place to Belong" is a quiet reckoning with lineage, identity, and the ephemeral architecture of memory. At the center of this work is a faded family photograph. Surrounding this image, I’ve interwoven elements charged with symbolic weight, a pink orchid that gestures toward fragility and beauty, an antique ceramic vase bearing the patina of generations.
As a mixed-race artist of Japanese, Italian, and German descent, I’ve lived at the crossroads of cultures. This work is less a resolution than a question suspended in visual form: What does it mean to belong to more than one world, and to inhabit none fully?
In blending the real and the imagined, I aim to create dreamlike compositions that defy linear time. My work resists closure, inviting viewers to linger in ambiguity, to explore the ancestral stories that shape us, and to find meaning in the spaces where past and present fold into each other.