Semisensory

A visual meditation on distant intimacies — relationships that are felt profoundly, yet remain partly out of reach. What began as a visual metaphor for dissociation and a blunted sense of experience, evolved into a story about relationships shaped as much by profound closeness as by their inherent distances. 

At the heart of the project lies the complex, layered bond between mother and child, characterised by a uniquely intimate connection, and also by its very severance. 

This disconnection isn't just literal either, you will only ever know your mother as your mother — never the full person she was before you, never the versions of her that could have existed without you. There is a tenderness here, but also a rupture: an asymmetrical intimacy, shaped by care, longing, and the impossibility of fully knowing or being known. 

This metaphorical distance becomes literal in the artist’s own experience: For the past three years, all communication with his mother has been filtered through a screen, creating an additional layer of separation in which mothering becomes both figurative and technologically mediated. Physical absence, delayed touch, fragmented voice — all contribute to a sense of partiality. 

But Semisensory is also about how care evolves in absence: the artist and his friends, all international students far from home, learn to mother one another in quiet, improvised ways. This reconfiguration of intimacy is both communal and fragile, grounding the work in gestures of tenderness and self-preservation. 

The project explores this dissonance through visual metaphors that evoke this layered disconnection: arms reaching out, cheeks pressing to light, fingertips unable to connect, all gestures of affection that never quite make contact. Sensation here is partial — not absent, but dulled. The body thus becomes a site of half-feeling. 

Across the series, images shift between emotional softness and sensory estrangement. Veiled eyes, peeling skin, blurred identities, and tactile details that evoke a body living at a remove, yet struggling to fully feel. The series speaks to dissociation not as detachment, but as a slow, aching kind of presence — like reaching through fog, or listening through glass. 

Semisensory explores the beauty and the difficulty of care that is mediated, distanced, and incomplete. It lingers in the quiet in-between: presence and absence, memory and embodiment, sensation and silence, asking what it means to experience closeness without clarity, to feel the trace of another’s presence without ever fully making contact.