This project originated from my experiences using dating apps over the past year, initially serving as a documentation of my inner struggles as the “other” in romantic encounters: being romanticized, alienated, objectified, and subjected to the gaze. At the same time, these encounters became a space for reciprocal investigation and self-examination, raising questions around reflexivity, desire, and the ways in which we perceive and construct one another. The work first took the form of fragmented, private writing, unbound by genre and moving between essay, poetry, and prose. Writing has become a scale and vessel for emotion, carrying experiences that are fragmented, intimate, and difficult to contain within a fixed narrative.

Gradually, the project expanded to explore how this “otherness” is constructed through the other identities I embody—such as Asian, foreigner, or woman. Many of these experiences ultimately seem to point towards colonialism: the colonization of the body, the colonized body. Dating within the project is only a small context, yet it becomes a space in which social power dynamics are exposed and negotiated. The politics of embodiment and corporeality appear to be an inescapable framework for me. Yet this also leads to another question: how can we maximize de-identification, de-gendering, and the erasure of racial difference? When we strip away these symbolic layers and simply encounter each other as real people, who am I, and who are you? This is the expression I wish to convey most.