The Patterns We Carry

My work examines how memory, inheritance, and expectation shape our understanding of love, labor, and belonging. Growing up within the quiet weight of generational habits, my father’s perfectionism and my mother’s deep empathy, I learned early how care and pressure can exist side by side. Now, as a newly married man, I navigate the space between gratitude and anxiety, wanting to provide, to care, and to build a home that honors what I was taught. 

This series stages intimate scenes of a young couple, rendered in a love-forward palette and moody, cinematic light. Drawing from both a nostalgic aesthetic and contemporary domestic life, the images blur the boundaries between memory and present experience. My practice reflects on the shifting balance between labor and rest, presence and absence, fear and devotion. In examining the roles and responsibilities of marriage, I question how we might become different from the patterns we have inherited. 

The work draws from stories of our parents’ early marriage, building a life together within the constraints of a small apartment. In these shared spaces, daily routines became a form of communication through the placement of objects, the division of labor, and the quiet negotiations of coexistence. This work rests in that space of becoming, where a husband looks at the life unfolding beside him and begins to see that, through both struggle and stillness, their everyday life is already the dream he once imagined, made meaningful by who he shares it with.