Vessels of Grief: Materializing Diasporic Mourning in Atlanta

Our mothers, our water, our peace is a deeply personal, community-centered project reflecting on the resilience, grief, and love of the Atlanta Asian community. This two-year initiative extends my devotion to finding poetics in diasporic narratives—their grief as well as their beauty. In 2024, one hundred hand-blown glass vessels, each filled with water from Atlanta’s rivers and creeks, were placed in Asian American civic and cultural spaces, as well as twelve family homes. This constellation of vessels acted as quiet yet profound symbols of intergenerational and racial healing, fostering rituals, gatherings, and intimate practices of remembrance.

In 2025, the vessels reunited in a communal installation at the Goat Farm, coinciding with the fourth anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings. For sixteen days, the site became a living archive, illuminating often invisible histories.

This presentation considers how the project reimagines memorial-making through materially fragile, spatially dispersed, and affectively charged forms. Glass and water serve as conduits for grief, circulating loss across bodies, spaces, and histories. Moving between abstraction and figuration, the project refused spectacle or closure, instead proposing mourning as an ongoing practice of intimacy and resilience. By inhabiting both private and civic spaces, Our mothers, our water, our peace resists the extractive logic of monumental memorials and honors the complexities of protection and visibility within communities shaped by generational and racial trauma. It redefines how public art in the Americas might register loss through fragility, care, and shared presence.