Blue Bursts Blue Kisses

I collected sand from the shore and pour handfuls stained with ultramarine pigment through fragile rice paper hourglasses cut with video game explosions. What unfolds is a slow choreography of pouring, shaping, spilling, and restabilising: roles of care ripple outward, from the filmmakers who capture each crackle, to family members who prepare tea in the next room, to the sea breeze that shifts grains beyond human control. On screen, grains swirl in the air, paper curls into laser-kissed scars, and sculptural shards buckle under their own weight. These “sand timers” refuse to hold. They collapse, collapse again, and in their impermanence become portraits of touch that are intimate and elusive, mirroring the fleeting and flattening quality of digital contact. This work embodies the tension of holding, balancing hypervigilance in digital life with the demands of mothering and making, while foregrounding process as a sensual archive. Empty vessels scattered blue dust, and memories of hands no longer present hold space for the unseen: children drifting in and out of frame, subtle shifts in the studio, everyday care unfolding around me. Blue Bursts, Blue Kisses bridges digital and physical intimacy, offering a messy, porous space that reawakens embodied encounter in an always-on, ever-shifting world. The processual narrative appears in both Chinese and English, an intentional interruption that reflects my family’s bilingual conversations and our life lived between the UK and China. It offers glimpses of what lies just beyond the frame and deepens the work’s layered meaning.