Jerome: In your personal introduction, you list “mother” as one of your identities, which really resonated with me. Could you share your perspective on what it means to be a mother? After becoming a mother, has observing your child opened up new creative directions for you? As an artist and a mother, I was reminded of the book The Baby on the Fire Escape–Creativity and the Dilemmas of Motherhood. Have you ever faced similar dilemmas, especially considering the postpartum depression you mentioned earlier? How do you navigate such a dilemma, and what role does art play in that process?

HMY: To position the role of a mother alongside that of an artist or writer is to emphasize that motherhood, too, is a form of work. Even today, the labor and sacrifice inherent in this role remain invisible and unpaid, legitimized as societal oppression under the guise of love. Motherhood weaves through identities and emotions; it is at once an exploited role, a condition, and a form of labor, but also a deep, complex emotion and a unique way of engaging with the world. Becoming a mother inevitably reshaped my relationship with the world, yet it thrust me into a continual game of balancing the conflicting identities of artist and mother. It is a game in which I strive to reclaim my name and agency from the all-encompassing label of mother. I was unsure whether my postpartum depression was a physiological condition or the anguish of a diminished sense of self in becoming a mother. The pain was both tangible and urgent, compelling me to seek answers and relief. Rather than simply addressing or coping with my depression, I chose—or returned—to artistic means as a way to explore and make sense of the tension between creativity and motherhood.

In my very first video work, Confession: Prologue (2018), I asked, “Is the greatness of motherhood a brutal transaction between the mother’s own existence and the arrival and growth of another life?” By exposing the rawest, often unutterable thoughts from the subconscious, I posed questions to the world, compelling viewers to join me in gazing at and interrogating the concept of motherhood. By the end of the video, I offered my own resolution: “I found our real connection in the beautiful lines manifested through a newborn’s hand. The world came into being through her newly awakened consciousness—a new life fathoming the form and formlessness of the world through artmaking. These dots and lines led me back to my child.” It is my daughter’s making that inspires me, giving me the courage to return to and recreate a new vision of motherhood through art.

Jerome: The womb is where every person is nurtured, yet in patriarchal cultures, it has often been stigmatized. Even the word “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for womb (hysterikos). I was especially struck by your work exhibited in Busan, where you use darkness to evoke the space of the womb while also making a statement on misogyny. In Night Sutra and The Womb, how does this darkness become a way to question and critique patriarchy?

HMY: “Hysteria” has long been a stigma attached to female agency since the beginning of history. Psychologist Sigmund Freud once stated, “The sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.” The unfathomability and perceived uncontrollability of women have repeatedly been equated with madness and darkness. For me, reclaiming the right to reinterpret feminine darkness is key to resistance. In this context, darkness unfolds in layers of meaning: the histories of oppression, the obscured forms and desires, and the misinterpreted cries and calls.

Night Sutra and The Womb attempt to provide an alternative hermeneutic to reframe the darkness and pain of the womb. First, a direct gaze into the abyss is necessary. This gaze requires me to undertake intensive research and reading—to understand how women’s voices have been erased in history and to learn how those voices have survived. One of the focal points of Night Sutra is Buddhism’s misogynistic traditions. Therefore, I must uncover examples of women being excluded from Buddhist scriptures and reread these texts through Spivak’s feminist and deconstructive approach.

From the perspective of art, my strategy is to replace the existing symbolisms in the canon. I substitute darkness with the poetics of the night and create the night with the Chinese Dong’s bright cloth. I suggest the entanglement of women’s destiny through their hair. And I use egg whites, which produce the bright cloth, to replace the scriptural metaphor at the start of the film—that Buddha attained enlightenment as if breaking through an eggshell. When all references become poeticized, the darkness and pain of the night begin to transform into an inspiration that returns to life and creativity themselves. As the madwoman in the studio, I treat this “madness” as a subconscious drive to resist—a requisite for poetry. Such persistent and determined “madness” brings into being works that extend beyond the reach of reason and rationality. The “hysteria” of the womb is the inescapable rhythm and struggle of every being in their arrival into the world.

Jerome: Your upcoming solo exhibition, What Migrates Shall Remain, shares its title with one of your earlier paintings. How did your ideas evolve from that single painting into a full exhibition? What new directions or insights emerged in the process?

HMY: The title of my upcoming solo exhibition at Zhi Art Museum, What Migrates Shall Remain, originates from a painting shown at UCCA Edge in 2023. The well-known Dutch tulip depicted in the painting was, in fact, first discovered in the deserts of Kazakhstan. These wildflowers were later brought to Ottoman Turkey, where they were artificially cultivated and eventually sold in the Netherlands in the 16th century—leading to the European tulip mania and the economic bubble that followed. In the painting, the tulip, its bulb drooping, is dying. Once a meaningless natural object, it became a sacred flower, a symbol of devotion to Allah, before transforming into the transient yet hollow emblem of European vanitas paintings. Eventually, it was reduced to an ephemeral currency during the Dutch economic frenzy. The tulip’s journey of migration speaks, on the one hand, to the inevitability of forgetting and change, while also embodying the continuation and evolution of life itself.

This exhibition reflects that very duality, particularly in how my contemporary artistic practice engages with the transcultural history of woodblock printing. I was especially moved by how the art historian Vivek Gupta described my peripatetic existence similar to a group of itinerant astrologers from the minoritized Roma ghurabā’ (literally, strangers) community, who were largely responsible for these printed leaves and long scrolls of religious amulets in Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, Aramaic, and Syriac. I really love this comparison. As a “stranger" to all the traditions and cultures that I love, I want to take part in this endless flow of migration.

Jerome: The mirror is a multifaceted imagery in your work. It appears in Persian stories and also references the psychoanalytic dimension—for instance, Freud’s mirror of the ego, id, and superego. Of course, it also brings to mind Lacan’s 1949 report The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I. How has the meaning of the mirror evolved in your artistic practice over time? What first drew you to the motif of the mirror, and how have you integrated it into your work?

HMY: Mirrors appear in almost all of my works, most notably in the Mirror Pavilion series, which is inspired by ancient Persian folklore. In the version relayed by the Persian poet Rumi, the mirror is a Sufi mystical object that symbolizes spiritual reflection, self-awareness, and the manifestation of divine reality. In my 2023 solo exhibition at ShanghArt Gallery, The Unending Rose, the Mirror Pavilion installation attempts to reflect Jorge Luis Borges’ concept of the endless labyrinths of literature. The video installation in that exhibition, Panchatantra (2003), contemplates the migration of this symbol across different cultural contexts—such as the metaphorized Buddha-nature in Buddhism, the dreamy illusion and emptiness in the literary reference “Flowers in the Mirror,” and the collusion of power and desire in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. The form of books mirrors distinct civilizational thinking and poetry mirrors the mind of the poet. There is also my own redefinition of the mirror: the mother-daughter relationship.

Night Sutra represents another step in my exploration of the Lacanian Mirror Stage. As you have pointed out, the mirror is a complex image in my work, and its complexity unfolds through its varying meanings across different contexts. Ultimately, it is the viewer who defines how the mirror is interpreted. The one who holds the mirror decides whether what they see is a vision, a desire, or a dream. My role is to create a fluid space for reflection, constantly provoking thoughts of relevance and connection.

Jerome: In your work, you incorporate recordings of your sessions with a Lacanian psychoanalyst. What drew you to a Lacanian clinical approach? What aspects of this psychoanalytic experience left the deepest impression on you? Is the analyst a woman?

HMY: Unfortunately, the psychoanalyst is a man. I had tried to find a female psychoanalyst, but they all rejected my request to record the sessions. The psychoanalyst I worked with was also an artist, which allowed him to understand and cooperate with my artistic experiment. My choice to adopt a Lacanian “clinical” approach stems from the complex entanglement between psychoanalysis and feminism. I wanted to throw myself into this experimental field and experience what Freud called the “dark continent.” Another reason is the parallel between Lacanian thought and Buddhism—Lacan sees the self as an illusion, a concept that closely aligns with the Buddhist notion of “no-self”(anattā ).

Lacan believes that the subject is essentially a speaking being formed by language. I have experienced the pleasure of speech during my psychoanalytic sessions. The act of speaking itself is inspiring in the sense that it has turned me into the object of examination for myself when words exited from the body. What I find most interesting is that while making Night Sutra, I had to “suture” the fragmented speech from my psychoanalytic recordings. In this process, I am both the artist-psychoanalyst-subject conducting the analysis and the object being analyzed. Such an experience is intriguing, and I have not yet been able to fully comprehend its mystery. I have been discussing this with my psychoanalyst recently, and I plan to use the same method—creating new works—to explore the creative potential of being both a unified object-subject.

Jerome: I came across the term jouissance in commentaries of your work, meaning a state of excessive pleasure where revulsion and fascination coexist. The desire of the big Other is both unsettling and repulsive, yet at the same time, exhilarating and captivating. This paradoxical state is common in contemporary art practice. However, your work gives me a sense of something beyond—a kind of “subversion.” This “subversion” could be understood as a process of “feminine” subjectivization: the act of transforming what is foreign into something that becomes yours. The term “cultural fluidity” has often been used in past introductions to your work, but to me, rather than simply flowing, your process seems to be active. I would love to hear more your thoughts on jouissance as a psychoanalytic concept, and how you engage in feminine subjectivization within your artistic practice. What strategies do you employ in this process?

HMY: I think you are particularly right that the fluidity in my work comes entirely from my agency to experiment—a result of my bodily engagement with desire and curiosity. Art history and archaeology can serve as methodological references for cross-cultural exchange. But as an artist, I can bring non-existent exchanges into being through creation. This is a subversive power enabled by my agency: allowing all that had never belonged to me—nor had ever accepted me—to enter my world through love and desire. This could indeed be seen as a “feminine” act. As Lacan has said, the vagina can be a form of phallus, as its embrace and absorption constitute its mode of subjectivization. My feminine act manifests as a fervent desire for knowledge and creativity—a constant act of absorbing and generating knowledge. This subjectivization and agency are also a Sartrean freedom, a freedom I choose to grasp, even to the extent of actively creating the conditions for it. This form of freedom requires me to constantly make decisions for myself and take responsibility for them—along with their costs and pain. This pain itself is my jouissance.

Jerome: In recent years, your work has explored various book forms, including woodblock printing and manuscript-making. Beyond the visual organization and presentation of information, you seem more concerned with the very state of knowledge itself. I would like to understand “paradise is a library” from such a perspective. The library here does not refer to a library in the institutional sense of knowledge and power, but as a space where human perception exists in multiple forms. When did your interest in different book forms begin? What is it about woodblock printing and manuscripts that captivates you?

HMY: My experience studying Sanskrit at Oxford University deepened my interest in different forms of books. It also granted me access to the rich collection of manuscripts in the Bodleian Library—a repository of the world’s printing and bookmaking history, shaped by British colonialism. From Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts to Persian miniature paintings to engraved wooden prints from China and Japan, the form of books—their page design, graphics, and texts—reflects culturally and temporally specific ways of thought. Their materials, too, bear witness to distinct material and technological civilizations. The similarities and differences between books stimulate endless intellectual exploration. This encyclopedic approach to knowing the world intrigues me, yet its biases also unsettle me, as many forms of literature and art—being immaterial, oral, and performative—have been left out of libraries. For this reason, libraries have never been my paradise. Night Sutra seeks to pay homage to these intangible civilizations and oral literary traditions, incorporating the songs of the Chinese Dong and Cambodian Khmer-Buddhist traditions, as well as Cambodian classical dance and shadow puppetry. The single pages of books can no longer contain my ever-expanding research interests.

Jerome: We are spoken by languages—it is a form of alienation. Language provides us with the tools for expression, yet at the same time, it suppresses certain possibilities of expression. This leads me to a different perspective on your multilingual practice: you seem to be searching for an escape in the gaps between languages. I wonder how you approach this? Language is also a way of thinking. Would different languages offer you different ways of seeing the world? Has your understanding of non-Western languages deepened your questioning of Western values? In these linguistic gaps, how can women engage in self-representation and self-writing? What challenges do they face?

HMY: Studying multiple languages has allowed me to see the differences between cultures, but I am equally excited to discover the connections between them. For instance, my studies in Sanskrit introduced me to the interconnected histories of Indo-European languages—the fact that ancient India and contemporary English share the same linguistic roots. These connections can all be explored through linguistics and etymology. The distances and differences between individuals, as well as between civilizations, sometimes seem to dissolve with a single word. My knowledge of non-Western languages has actually helped me understand the historical interplay and mutual shaping of Eastern and Western cultures. As Craig Clunas argues in his recent book The Echo Chamber, the concepts of “East” and “West” were constructed through their reciprocal influences and are therefore inseparable. Just as I question the West, I also question the so-called “East.” The deconstruction should be thorough.

Just as the concepts of “East” and “West” are constructed paradigms, so too is the concept of “women.” To truly understand its fallacies, we must look beyond its constructed framework and critically examine its origins and institutional foundations. To explore how women represent and write for themselves, we must move beyond a purely gendered perspective. First, we must recognize that women are not merely gendered beings; rather, they exist at the intersections of culture, social institutions, religion, class, individual experiences, and countless other factors. The dilemmas faced by a Western white woman are inevitably different from those of a Chinese woman. This is why I believe women must examine their own conditions through the lens of lived experience. Only by understanding the structures and conditions that give rise to these dilemmas can we begin to formulate solutions. The struggles are many, but every step forward, every act of creation, is historic—like landing on the moon.

Jerome: Translation is impossible, yet absolutely necessary—your perspective on multilingual practice is truly compelling. In the commentary on Genesis, the Hebrew word Babel literally means "to confuse" or "to create disorder." To me, your approach to "translation" may seem to reconcile linguistic conflicts, but in reality, it generates a productive sense of Babel. It disrupts what appears to be a stable and powerful system, unsettling its structure while restoring presence and voices to those who have been absent or silenced. I’d love to hear more about how you put this idea of "translation" into practice in your art. I'm especially interested in your reference to Spivak’s concept of "love that permits fraying"—could you talk more about how this idea plays out in your work?

HMY: My translation practice extends beyond language itself. In my artworks, I strive to give viewers a physical and mental experience of “how the female Other perceives the world through her own language and culture.” Therefore, when I transcribed ancient Persian stories in the Mirror Pavilion series, I did not want to render the story literally by making figurines of the Chinese and Greek painters. Instead, I want to create the texture of the literary text by transforming the mirror element in the story into a mirror pavilion installation that cuts across the space. Surrounded by paintings in the style of Persian miniatures, the pavilion incorporates the traditional Chinese garden design principle of “trading the scenery with moving steps” to shape the spatial experience and viewing path. I deliberately avoided a didactic approach, aiming instead to provoke thought through sensory experience and movement. I see this as a form of translation, akin to Spinoza’s concept of “affect.”

However, linguistic translation remains just as important. Rather than fostering true plurality, contemporary globalization often amounts to nothing more than Westernization or Americanization—making translation an urgent and necessary act. The translation theory that has influenced me most is Spivak’s concept of “love that permits fraying.” What causes fraying is precisely the plurality and differences between cultures, which inevitably lead to conflict. Yet, as translators, we must make these differences visible—to embrace the Other with love and to awaken a sense of love in our readers.