Unable

Unable is an installation-performance that examines parental love as a protective force that can simultaneously injure, staging care as a form of pressure within East Asian family dynamics.

Unable investigates the ambivalence of care in parent–child relationships, particularly within East Asian cultural frameworks where protection is often entwined with expectation. At the center is a soft silicone sphere—skin-like and vulnerable—figured as the child. Its surface is embedded with sharp metal needles, recalling the hedgehog: a body designed to defend itself, yet capable of causing pain through the very mechanism of protection. As the sphere moves, pressure accumulates; the needles imprint small marks that register how discipline and aspiration can become tactile, lingering traces on the self.
The accompanying performance extends this logic through repeated labor. Pushing the weighted, resistant form up an incline only for it to return again and again evokes a Sisyphean loop—an exhaustion shared by both parent and child when love becomes an endless demand for improvement. The final work presents the altered object alongside video documentation, inviting viewers to reflect on how intimacy can oscillate between shelter and harm, tenderness and control.