Lili’s home

Flip book video

Hand-crafting process video

“Lili’s Home” is a photography and visual art book I created in 2025. Its creative inspiration grew from my first trip abroad that year. During my travels in Southeast Asia, I took many photographs and later gradually organized them along with numerous pictures I had taken before, eventually editing them into this book. The book’s overarching tone is black, its fiery pulse aligning with the scars on my arm.

Stratum

“Stratum” is a series of photographs selected from Chapter IX of my visual art book “Lili’s Home.”

The title “Stratum” refers to geological layers formed by rock, sediment, or loose deposits—structures shaped by nature over time.

These works source from photos I took between 2020 and 2025, blended through layered compositions. They embody my splintered senses under medication and physical therapy, and the stratified emotions cycled through bipolarity.

In 2019, I was diagnosed with cyclothymic disorder, also known as bipolar disorder or manic depression—a condition where mental states oscillate in relentless seasonal or cyclical waves.

To this day, I witness countless teenagers sent from schools to psychiatric wards. Under academic pressure, parents often rush to “cleanse” stigmatized illnesses like depression or OCD from their children. First comes therapy, then hospitalization and medication. When drugs fail, parents—as legal guardians—authorize physical procedures for their minor children. Unnoticed, many of us lose our right to express.

This “treatment” requires general anesthesia before channeling electricity directly into the brain. Parents are told it stabilizes moods, but at the cost of temporary amnesia. I knew nothing until wheeled into the procedure room. After seven rounds of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), each lasting thirty minutes, I lost swathes of memory. Streets of my hometown felt foreign. It took me five years to reclaim these memories, most of which I spent expressionless.

ECT stole my past. I pressed the shutter through emotional numbness, layer upon layer merging into images that mirror my fractured psyche—where dreams, memories, and reality collide.

News of fellow patients’ suicides reminds me: most of us are rendered voiceless. Many now breathe through the weight of a lifetime of silences. The mentally ill are often objects observed and defined by others; viewers gaze at images of us with voyeuristic fascination. Our expressions are too raw, too intense, too intimate to be contained—so I cloak images, hiding and slamming these emotions against the unspeakable.

Each piece is named after a moment frozen in its composite photos: endless layered days and nights where my emotions materialize in singular frames. Blending them births my “Stratum“—an overlapping of my subjective reality, a scream of rage against imposed silences from a mind refusing to be silenced.