My research asks how a sense of home can be rebuilt after one has left the previous dwelling. It focuses on the physical and psychological process that unfolds in the new rooms, the mixture of strangeness and inexplicable familiarity that appears while furniture is arranged and routines are re-learned, and the second wave of uncanny impression that returns when one must pack up and leave the space that has finally become ‘home’. Across my practice, I examines the use of déjà vu as an artistic strategy of ‘affect’, particularly in connection to the spatial and temporal displacement associated with the unheimlich (i.e. uncanny/ un-homely). My work specifically focuses on the displacement that occurs when one is away from one’s home. It is grounded in Sigmund Freud’s (1919) and Nicholas Royle’s (2003) understanding of the unheimlich, which they describe as a peculiar combination of feeling familiar yet unfamiliar, to throw light on the process of examining the continuity of home.

In my practice, two drawing-based series—The Darkness Series (2020-2021) and The Emptiness Series, which reflect the two experiences outlined above. The first embodies the unsettled process of moving into a new home, while the second captures the sensation of leaving a space that has only just become ‘home’.

The Darkness Series (2020-2021), originated from my personal experience of moving into a new residence in London in 2020. The creation of the work coincided with the global COVID-19 lockdown. I specifically observed that this unsettling feeling was magnified at night, as the darkness seemed to drown out the sense of familiarity that I had gradually built up during the day, leaving me hovering between a feeling of being ‘at home’ and ‘unhomely’.

In this series, I primarily explore the process of establishing the continuity of ‘home’ within a strange environment. I investigate how a sense of belonging is reconstructed through physical interaction with objects. Specifically, I treat familiar furniture and everyday items as “transitional objects” (Donald Winnicott, 1951). These items serve as a bridge between my past and future, providing psychological comfort and alleviating my anxiety of displacement. The drawings trace my psychological shift from the initial confusion of moving in to the eventual establishment of a sense of dwelling.

I use pencil drawings (and later correction fluid in some works) to visually interpret these psychological states, recording my living experience in two distinct stages. Stage One (Seeking Familiarity): to depict my initial experience of displacement and uncertainty, I covered the picture plane with large areas of black. I left only the looming image of a single object, such as a chair(see Fig. 1), visible near the center. This visual strategy represents the isolation of the object in an unknown context. Visually, the image is difficult to recognize from a distance and requires close viewing to identify. This metaphorically illustrates the struggle of finding a sense of home in a strange environment, while the dark tones emphasize a quietness, confusion, and uncertainty. Stage Two (Establishing a sense of ‘home’): as I became more familiar with the space, my drawing style evolved. I began using identifiable white lines, and sometimes correction fluid, to depict the objects. Instead of isolated items, my drawings began to show the specific configurations of the furniture and the layout of the room. This shift represents the formation of a mental map. The objects are no longer floating in darkness but are shown in relation to one another, becoming part of a coherent scene. This visual clarity reflects my psychological transition from feeling strange to feeling ‘at home’, even in the dark.

In short, in this series, I use previously familiar objects as transitional objects in the new dwelling space to establish a sense of ‘home’. The drawings reveal the psychological transition from the initial unease to complete settlement, presented through the way I depicted isolated images and the configuration of objects in the dark.

The Emptiness series (2021) was created on white paper with correction fluid. It draws its inspiration from the final stage of my dwelling experience when I had to vacate my flat due to the end of a lease. The core inspiration lies in the complex emotion of standing in an empty room that I had just inhabited. Although the physical space was void of furniture, I retained a vivid mental image of where every object had been placed. It felt as though a ‘familiar breath’ still lingered in the space, creating a sensation where the furniture seemed present even though it was actually gone. Through this series, I explore the psychological uncertainty that exists between the physical reality of an empty room and the persistence of memory.

I utilized a unique visual approach, drawing with white correction fluid on white paper. This way renders the images nearly imperceptible. From a distance, the drawings appear to be entirely blank sheets of paper, serving as a direct metaphor for the empty room I faced. It is only when the viewer views the work from a very close distance that the outlines of the room’s layout, drawn in white fluid, become visible. This shift from blank space to revealed structure mirrors my own experience in which the visual blankness represents the physical emptiness, while the hidden, subtle lines represent the lingering mental map of the room’s previous arrangement. 

So, in both series, the concept of ‘uncertainty’ functions as a persistent psychological state defined by an oscillation between the unfamiliar and the familiar. This visual ambiguity serves a psychological function, which is about rebuilding a specific relationship with the object and the space. By rendering the objects difficult to discern, the works generate a perceptual struggle that mirrors the psychological shift from ‘groping in the dark’ to ‘rebuilding an image of the layout of the room in the mind’. By keeping the images poised between recognizable and the unrecognizable, this manipulation of visibility and obscurity establishes the critical context for exploring the issue of absence and presence.

Rather than dealing with solid form and volume, this work was utilized spot welding to construct thin, linear structures that replicate furniture and everyday items, functioning as images of objects 'drawn in the air'. This approach allows the surrounding environment to remain visible, preserving a sense of emptiness. The project deepens the exploration of 'uncertainty' and investigates "the unheimlich" by adopting the concept of “Gestalt familiarity"(a kind of similarity of the particular configuration of elements). By reproducing the exact configuration of the bedroom, the work tests the viewer’s ability to identify images of furniture (such as bed, desk, chair, and chest of drawers) and small daily objects (such as mirror, picture frame, and switch) and generate a sense of familiarity, aiming to trigger a déjà vu experience. It also examines the viewer’s reaction to the ‘uncertainty' created when objects hover between the visible and the invisible.

To realize this, the work was executed at a life-size (1:1) scale using spot-welded tubing (2.4mm & 1.6 mm), which were then uniformly painted with white spray paint. Placed in a semi-enclosed white cube, the work creates a visual illusion that varies with distance. From a distance, the white linear elements blend into the background, making the space appear empty. But when viewing the work from a close distance, the lines reveal the recognizable forms of the bed, desk, and other items. The whole work and display space was covered by white paint, and the choice of white as the dominant hue of this work, not only in order to keep the whole work unified so as to achieve a visually indistinguishable feeling, but to reproduce the aforementioned uncertain feeling in a very calm way by avoiding the emotional influence of colour as much as possible, creating a quiet atmosphere that enhances the sense of uncertainty by making the elements difficult to distinguish, mirroring the visual effects of the The Emptiness series.

In this regard, I interpreted a similar feeling in the work Home and 'Home' (Fig. 16-18) in 2016 by a linear sculptural installation. In that work, I am trying to explore the interlacing experience of being trapped in memories and in the present space. Therefore, I combined the configuration of my dormitory in London with that of my bedroom in China to reconstruct a mixture of past and present living spaces. This idea came from my experience that I once had the illusion for a few seconds when I was lying in bed in my dorm thought that I was lying in bed at home in China. I copied the image of the bed, desk, and wardrobe I used in China and placed them according to the configuration of my dormitory in London in the display space. As it visually looks white, that work is close to ‘transparent’ to a certain extent. That is to say, the sculpture in that work presents an effect that is sometimes visible but sometimes not perceptible from a particular angle or at a certain distance. This reminds me when I keep thinking about how to present a feeling of ‘emptiness’ and ‘uncertainty’ in a three-dimensional way as well as what I am trying to express in my drawing - The Emptiness series.

Unlike solid sculpture, a linear piece keeps a sense of emptiness while retaining recognizable information. As an image of an object drawn in the air, the environment around and even behind the linear three-dimensional drawing is still visible. It bears a feature of transparency and insubstantiality, and to show a certain ‘ghostly’ quality. The effect is similar to the transparent fabric that used in Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s work. In Suh’s work, the transparent and soft fabric accurately replicates his living space, resembling a memory suspended in the air, conveying this untouchability through the translucent nature of the material itself. Suh’s transparent fabric installations are also a good representation of such ‘ghost’ state, which not only convey a strong sense of unsettled feelings and the intuitive response to the dislocations of an itinerant life regarding ‘home’, but there is also somehow a resonance between his works and my installation in that both reveal the displacement associated with dwelling space, whether physical or psychological, as well as the experiences of déjà vu and the uncanny impression they present.

By reducing objects to skeletal outlines to intensify the questioning of their presence and absence, the work delivers a feeling of uncertainty, like a ‘ghost’, causing the viewer to hover between reality and memory, the real and the unreal, and presence and absence. But, the sensation of the ‘ghostly’ is not limited to transparent or diaphanous materials. Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), for instance, is grey concrete solid sculpture that nevertheless evoke a profound sense of absence. In this context, the ghostly quality manifests through the work’s monumental and sarcophagus-like attributes associated with death, which serve to emphasize the physical absence of the building itself. Whiteread converts the voids of the inside spaces into concrete, solidifying the emptiness and preserving the subtle traces of history that lie on the surface. By transforming the absent into the present and the void into volume, she creates a ‘materialized absence’ that acts as a ‘doppelgänger’  of the original space. By casting the negative space, her work ‘mummifies the air’ of the past. The way Whiteread made the sculpture evokes the making of death masks and the associations of death and loss they entail. This anti-logical operation makes the invisible visible, presenting a peculiar uncanny impression between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Despite the differences in materiality among Suh’s transparent fabrics, Whiteread’s solid casts, and my installation, there is a shared resonance between us. All three works reveal the displacement associated with dwelling space, whether physical or psychological, as well as the experiences of déjà vu and the uncanny impression they present.

Within this shared framework, however, there are distinct differences. Suh’s transparent fabric installations serve as a good representation of this ‘ghost’ state, conveying the unsettled feelings and the intuitive response to the dislocations of an itinerant life regarding ‘home’ through the meticulous replication of space. Whiteread’s work, conversely, creates a ‘materialized absence’ from which the viewer can capture rich surface information from her work. In contrast, the Phantom Project invites the viewer to imagine the objects as they were through simple outline clues, questioning the nature of presence and absence through a different lens.

The relationship between installation art, viewer, and artist, is interactional, and the viewer's physical participation can enrich the integrity of the work. Installation art, compared with other forms of expression, such as painting, sculpture, and video, can provide the viewer with a sense of presence. According to Claire Bishop(2005), installation art presupposes that the work is completed only when a viewer physically enters the field the artist has staged. It creates a sense of atmosphere, which also provides people with an immersive experience. When the viewer enters this work, they enter the scene that the artist has pre-set. By replicating my dwelling space, I consciously created a scene and oriented the viewer with replicated images of furniture and daily objects that evoked memories and associations of their own familiar past. So, in Phantom Project, viewers are invited to step into this replicated bedroom, only to be confronted with ‘furniture’ that has lost all utility, like a bed that cannot bear weight, a chair that refuses to receive a body,etc.. With no object in the entire space offering the slightest possibility of habitation, the act of entering collapses into an empty gesture, and the sensation of displacement is triggered on the spot. The body that now moves through the scene is required to stand in for, and thus to mark the distance from, the body that once lived there.
 
Because each linear element is cut to the millimetre and positioned according to the original survey, the replica carries the evidentiary status of an index, but its translucency denies the mass that would certify presence. Precision becomes a ghost-maker: the viewer walks through coordinates that still remember a body, but nothing there can receive it. Every step therefore repeats a past itinerary only to find it hollow, and displacement is no longer a theme to be illustrated but the basic condition the work sets in motion.

During the display, thewhite floor gradually accumulated footprints (unintended indexical traces left by viewers，see Fig.19). The more the floor unintentionally records the present bodies and their activites in this space, the more it confirms that the person who should occupy the room is missing. Recreating (or displaying) a dwelling scene emphasizes this problem of presence and absence, thereby highlighting the particularity of a past existence. The existence of many famous person's former residences has such a characteristic. However, Phantom Project somehow reverses the logic of the personality museum. Sigmund Freud’s house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, for example, through displaying the furnishings of the house, and the placement of everyday objects, the museum imply that “although their physical body was absent, their aura remained present” (Morra, 2018). Phantom Project , by contrast, offers only linear outlines that function like leftover fragments of memory. Instead of actual objects heavy with use, transparent wire replicas preserve shape while eliminating mass and founctionality, so the implied presence of the resident is replaced by an immediate recognition of his current absence. Viewers must reconstruct a life from these empty contours, an imaginative effort that invites association and emotional response.

As a reproduction of absence, the piece refer to a real room that must exist somewhere in the world. It shares its function as evidence of my past living space to some extent with the personality museum. Suggesting its presence in the past, and its absence in the present. Through the familiar layout, and a sense of habitant, viewers may map it onto every bedroom(or dwelling space) they remember, so they stand simultaneously in the space and in the 'ghost' of their own past spaces. Caught between real and unreal, familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely, the experience of displacement happens.