My photo-based works are the expression that I have as a result of being a gay man and an Asian in the United States. I use self-portraits, staged imagery and landscapes to explore my struggle of being both a homosexual and a homophobic person. I question the norm set by the hegemony, including race, sexuality and ideology. Raised by a conservative family, a military father and a civil servant mother, I feared to admit that I was gay until I came to the United States in 2014. Fortunately, I grew up in the capital city of China where I had the chance to experience the global vision through the Internet. On the one hand, I learned knowledge of being a gay man, and received the representation from Hollywood movies that white people are ideal and superior in many ways. On the other hand, via the Internet, I witnessed the debates between the Chinese political and cultural ideology and the Western ideology led by the United States. Among these conversations, I found out that I have always been trying to seek and identify a better world, not only as a gay man, but also as a human being.

The self-portraits of my death not only expresses the inequality of gay men in this world, but also reveals my self-denial and self-hating in a problematic society, which includes both China and America.

My photographs of people that I find through online dating apps expose my current situation with other gay men in the States. I examine the racism and discrimination in the white-dominated gay community, the worship of masculine whiteness and the pervasive misogyny in the world. Furthermore, my landscapes of China and America document the paths to finding a utopian space. They juxtapose hope and apathy, which keep shifting back and forth along my changes of geographic location and psychological states. Through my photography practice, I use various subject matters to investigate my identity and interrogate the world.