Under the Same Roof After All

2025. (to be updated)

(to be updated)

“Under the Same Roof After All” is a kinetic installation constructed from a family portrait taken with a medium-format film camera during the Chinese New Year of 2025. The original image was printed on transparent material, divided into five fragments—mother, father, self, aunt, and grandmother—and mounted within individual acrylic tubes. Each tube contains a motor and LED, enabling the portraits to spin independently.

The installation reveals both structure and fragility: motors, wires, nuts, and bolts remain exposed, a reminder of the unseen mechanisms and tensions that hold families together. The wiring converges into a single exit, suggesting that, however intricate or conflicted each life may be, the family ultimately shares one collective thread.

Because of inevitable micro-variations in the motors’ timing and speed, the five fragments rarely return to perfect alignment. At times the portrait briefly coheres, only to drift apart again—echoing the everyday cycles of agreement and disagreement, closeness and distance, that define familial life. Each member rotates like a planet in its own orbit, yet all remain bound within the same constellation.