I Kept the Curtain Open When I Slept (2024)
“I Kept the Curtain Open When I Slept” is a deeply personal, mixed-media project that explores the invisible entanglements between sex, intimacy, and identity through a queer lens. Composed of a short experimental documentary and a series of black-and-white film photographs, the work captures the fragile resonance of temporary encounters—moments that linger long after they’ve passed, echoing quietly in the body and mind.
At the heart of the project is "I Had Sex, But…", a film that documents my first sexual experiences, originally filmed in 2021 shortly after moving from China to the UK. As a 24-year-old virgin navigating a new cultural landscape and still searching for a sense of self, sex became the most raw, mysterious, and intimate form of human connection I could imagine. The footage was initially created for a school project, but I couldn’t face editing it until years later—the emotional aftermath was too blurred, too unresolved. In 2025, I returned to the material with fresh eyes and an open wound.
The photographs, intentionally grainy and out of focus, function not as documentation but as emotional residue—distorted fragments of memory that evoke disembodiment, longing, and numbness. They speak to the psychic noise that followed the film’s creation: the tension between intimacy and transaction, connection and detachment, presence and erasure. Figures dissolve into texture, light bleeds into shadow, and meaning slips just beyond clarity—echoing the contradictions embedded in East Asian cultural silence around sex, and the personal confusion that blooms within it.
This project sits within stillness and chaos alike. It is about what remains when everything else quiets down—the ache, the ambiguity, the flickers of self that surface when we allow ourselves to truly look, and to feel.
- 2025 “Dreams and Nightmares” Exhibition, Boomer Gallery, London, UK
- 2025 “Tensions We Live With” Exhibition, Espacio Handers Gallery, Madrid, Spain