Renovating Kinship

the possibility of practicing coexistence This project is based on documentary photography and anthropological field research. I bring up the discussion of family combinations, support systems, and non-biological kinship between different generations. Meanwhile, I also document how neoliberalism affects this kind of relationship in their societal life practice. Renovating Kinship started with documenting an alternative-familial-relationship between 3 guys from totally different backgrounds, which might be regarded as a common alternative family configuration but also very intriguing for me as an alien. Jim, 65, was moving back to the place he grew up and trying to do the renovation of the old building where he used to live. Because of his age, he was no longer doing the renovation by himself, so he gathered these two men, Michael (24) and Tom (66), to help him with the renovation, and he supplied them with rooms to live in. This is a long term project which is still going. Through the cross-generational dialogues and images between rebellious young adults and elder descendants of working class immigrants, demonstrates the differences/integration and the possibilities/limitations of different generations. Furthermore, adding the artist's own background to discuss the systematic problems under contemporary social contexts. The body of work is based on the narrative & story of this documentary project, and it extends to installation, place, deconstruction of framing images, large scale of images, etc.. Overall, the main purpose is to interrogate the uneven distribution of resources between typical family combinations and alternative family combinations in American society. Also, my body of work leans to look toward all kinds of systematic balance/imbalance with the hope of showing how we might reconstruct and rethink these systems.