New Eden is an ongoing animatic video project that visualizes a fictional, fantastical city that appears to be a utopia. Beneath the surface, however, it is a place marked by hidden wounds of colonization.
ARTIST STATEMENT
New Eden emerges from an ongoing inquiry into how visual narratives can hold tension between the seduction of utopian imagery and the buried history that make such beauty possible. My practice begins with worldbuilding: constructing visual environments that appear coherent, harmonious, and meticulously designed, only to reveal fractures beneath their polished surfaces. The animatic at the center of this project continues this trajectory. It presents a place that is ornate and exquisitely composed—yet its elegance is inextricable from a history it seeks to suppress.
Visually, the project is anchored in an interest in ornamental languages and how they encode cultural desire. This includes Art Nouveau, with its flowing lines and stylized florals, alongside Chinoiserie, a European decorative style shaped by the romanticization of East Asian motifs. These aesthetics share a tendency to idealize the organic, to smooth complexity into stylized forms, and to project fantasies of purity or harmony. Their beauty is undeniable; their histories, however, are layered with displacement, appropriation, and power. In blending these visual traditions into the architecture and atmosphere of New Eden, I aim to show how utopias often consolidate themselves by selectively borrowing from the cultures they overshadow. The resulting world is not meant to be historically accurate or didactic. Instead, it is deliberately hybrid, shaped by layers of influence that coexist uneasily beneath an immaculate façade. In working on the animatic, I became increasingly drawn to the way plants function as metaphors within both religious and artistic traditions. Plants grow, spread, and intertwine; they can be cultivated or invasive, delicate or overwhelming. In New Eden, plant imagery is both an aesthetic device and a conceptual thread. It signals abundance and harmony while also hinting at something uncontrolled beneath the city’s surface.
This attention to aesthetic hybridity parallels a more personal dimension of the project. Growing up in Hong Kong—an environment shaped by British colonial rule, globalization, and complex cultural mixing—I became accustomed to inhabiting spaces where multiple histories intersect in subtle or contradictory ways. I was educated within a British school system, surrounded by Christian narratives and Western frameworks of knowledge, while also navigating the local contexts and identities that existed alongside them. This duality was never framed as a conflict, yet it produced moments of dissonance: the sense that cultural belonging could feel both expanded and displaced. While New Eden is not a direct depiction of Hong Kong, the project is rooted in this lived awareness of what it means to move through spaces that are at once familiar, foreign, and historically burdened.
The biblical reference embedded in the project—the Garden of Eden—provided a rich foundation for reimagining a place defined by promise and perfection. Instead of retelling the religious story, I was interested in the symbolic weight of Eden as a cultural idea: the fantasy of a place untouched, morally pure, and naturally abundant. By constructing a city named New Eden, I draw attention to how utopian language is often deployed in contemporary and historical contexts to justify expansion, control, or erasure.
Throughout the development of the project, critique played a significant role in clarifying how to communicate a clear narrative without relying on over-explanation. Earlier stages of the work revealed my tendency to compensate for unfinished visual material by verbally detailing symbolic intentions, aesthetic references, and conceptual frameworks. While these explanations helped articulate my thinking, they risked flattening the ambiguity I wanted the final work to embody. As the project evolved, I learned to trust the animatic’s pacing, mood, and visual motifs to carry meaning on their own terms. This shift allowed the work to become more atmospheric and less literal, enabling viewers to sense the underlying tensions without being explicitly directed toward them.
The technical process of constructing the animatic also shaped its conceptual texture. Working with roughly forty digital panels—each drawn individually and composed with attention to lighting, colour, and spatial rhythm—created a pace that mirrors the unfolding of memory and revelation within the story. Collaboration with the composer further influenced the work’s emotional tone. Music becomes a guide through the world’s layers: at times reinforcing its surface beauty, at other times amplifying a feeling of unease, especially as the narrative moves into flashbacks that disrupt New Eden’s polished image. These transitions between visual and sonic registers allow the animatic to shift from calm to disquiet, from clarity to ambiguity, in ways that words alone could not articulate.
Ultimately, New Eden is less about conveying a singular narrative conclusion and more about dwelling in the uncertainty of recognition. The project asks what happens when beauty is built upon selective memory, and what it means for individuals to confront the parts of their world they were never meant to see. Eve’s encounter in the alleyway, and the visions that follow, do not offer simple answers. Her choice—left unresolved in the final cut of the animatic—reflects my interest in leaving space for viewers to imagine their own interpretations. The ambiguity is intentional: it mirrors the complexities of living within cultural, historical, or personal systems that shape us in ways we cannot fully untangle.
By presenting a world that is visually inviting yet thematically fraught, I aim to create a space where viewers can experience both attraction and discomfort. New Eden is an imagined place, but the questions it raises—about history, identity, and the narratives that define our sense of belonging—are grounded in reality. Through the interplay of myth, ornamentation, and worldbuilding, the project invites reflection on how utopias are constructed, who they serve, and what is left hidden beneath their surface. I am interested in how images can seduce, distort, and reveal—and in what slips through the cracks of the stories we inherit.
