Between two self-portraits 2020-2025

2021 -

on-going autoetnographic artistic research​

text, two photographic prints

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In February 2020, I walked into the Japanese embassy in Warsaw to sign the papers renouncing my Japanese citizenship. Since I didn’t have a hanko—a traditional seal with one’s surname in Chinese characters—I was told to use my index finger. I dabbed it onto the ink pad or shuniku (朱肉, literally "vermilion meat") and pressed it onto the document.

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The corporeality of this act became a starting point for reflecting on identity—just as I was preparing to move to Japan, the country of my birth, on a government scholarship. This symbolic return to my roots came at the cost of my official citizenship (“nationality is only one,” read a poster at the embassy) and the right to officially use my Chinese characters. I sealed this transaction with my papillary lines. They formed a pictogram signifying my physical presence, my corporeal self.

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I enlarged the fingerprint. At that point, I was suffering from severe eczema. The skin on my hands was cracked and flaking. The magnified imprint looked like a mask – of my cracked, fragmented, itchy persona. And so it became my self-portrait of 2020.

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In March 2025, I completed my scholarship and concluded this chapter of living in Japan. I sealed this moment with a new self-portrait – a new fingerprint. It is a completely different sign. My skin has healed, cracks have converged. I have accepted them as the integral (or perhaps the core?) parts of me, symbols of my autopoietic, ever-shifting body.​

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Read the full text here (link)

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