AND IF THE SUN COMES OUT
And If Sun Comes is a site-specific installation created in 2021, during a period when the COVID-19 pandemic intensified already-existing structures of racism, suspicion, and violence toward Asian and Asian diasporic bodies. At the time, the rise of anti-Asian attacks was not only a political reality but also a psychic atmosphere: a daily condition of being watched, misread, blamed, and made foreign again. This work emerged from that atmosphere.
The installation explores the form of insects as a metaphor for xenophobia. Insects often occupy a contradictory place in human imagination. They are ancient, delicate, intelligent, communal, and essential to the ecosystem; yet they are also described through languages of disgust, invasion, infestation, contamination, and threat. These are the same vocabularies frequently attached to immigrants, racialized people, and bodies perceived as foreign. During the pandemic, this language became violently visible. Asian bodies were imagined through contagion, proximity, and danger, as if a person could be reduced to a carrier, a vector, an invasive presence.
By working with insect-like forms in the natural landscape, And If Sun Comes asks how fear is produced through perception. The insect becomes a site of projection. It is not feared only because of what it is, but because of what the dominant gaze imagines it to be: too many, too close, too strange, too difficult to control. In this sense, the work is not about insects as abject creatures, but about the social mechanism that turns certain lives into objects of disgust or panic.
Placed outdoors, the installation enters into a relationship with light, weather, plants, soil, and decay. The forms appear both vulnerable and persistent. They are exposed, but also camouflaged; fragile, but also adaptive. This tension reflects the condition of racialized visibility. To be seen can mean recognition, but it can also mean surveillance, suspicion, and violence. For many Asian immigrants and Asian diasporic people in 2021, public space carried this double charge: the desire to move freely, and the fear of being identified as a target.
The title "And If Sun Comes" conveys this ambivalence. Sunlight may nourish, reveal, and awaken, but it can also expose a body to danger. The phrase suggests a conditional hope, a fragile opening. What happens if the sun comes? What becomes visible? What survives after the night of fear? The work does not offer an image of easy healing. Instead, it stays with a more complicated state: emergence under threat, beauty under pressure, life continuing in a world that has named it unwanted.
Through the insect, I wanted to think about smallness not as weakness, but as strategy. Insects live through networks, touch, vibration, adaptation, and collective intelligence. They build, molt, hide, migrate, and return. Their bodies carry an alternative politics of survival. Against xenophobia’s fantasy of purity, borders, and control, the work proposes an ecological understanding of existence: every body is already entangled with other bodies, every environment is already shared, and the so-called foreign body is never truly outside.
And If Sun Comes is therefore a meditation on pandemic-era anti-Asian violence, but also on the longer histories of racialization that make such violence possible. It asks how a body becomes marked as invasive, how fear attaches itself to form, and how the unwanted body might still insist on presence. The installation reclaims the insect not as pest, but as kin, witness, and survivor, a figure for those who continue to live, gather, and transform under conditions of hostility.