Artwork description: This project began with a return. After a decade moving between the U.S., the U.K., and China, I came back to Shenzhen—only to find what I thought I missed had turned unfamiliar. The smell of stinky tofu made me ill; the southern humidity corroded buildings and sky into gray; even warmth carried melancholy. My body reacted with allergies and fatigue. I longed to vanish into the night. “Home” felt no lighter. Its fixed décor and ingrained habits bound me, stirring an urge to burn the dust-laden remnants of my past. Among them were four boxes of textbooks from my nine years of compulsory education—materials that had slipped out of time. These were the textbooks and study materials my brother and I used from elementary through high school, shaped entirely by China's high-pressure exam-oriented education system. It was a system built not to cultivate individuality, but to suppress it, replacing uncertainty with standardized answers and conformity. I began to ask: What remains of that education in me now? How has it shaped the way I think, speak, or exist? These objects, once filled with certainty and instruction, now felt hollow and inert, waiting to be reconfigured. I wondered whether they could be transformed into something else—not through meaning, but through material memory. At the Taoxichuan Glass Art Residency in Jingdezhen, I was given the opportunity to bring this question into form. Through the techniques of hot slumping and kiln forming, I placed the textbook covers between two sheets of molten glass. The gesture was a violent act. Paper, left to fire, burns in chaos. Yet, the glass withdrew oxygen from the flame, suspending the paper mid-combustion. What emerged was entrapment and suffocation. A trace fixed in time. A breath held within transparency. The resulting installation takes the form of a wall assembled from glass boxes. Some sections are clear, others opaque. Between the layers lie two-dimensional remnants of the textbooks, now carbonized, semi-transparent, and reshaped by heat. Some fragments are arranged into faint, broken text. You can see through the wall, yet it remains heavy with residue—bearing the imprint of what once defined how I thought, spoke, and conformed. In sunlight, the wall casts intricate shadows. This installation echoes on loss and recovery, the process of discarding and discovering. These textbook covers were once authoritative cultural material. I chose to erase them, preserve their remains, and transform them into visual evidence of their disappearance. This is my way of finding in losing, of reclaiming material not for what it said, but for what it now holds: silence, fragility, suspended breath. The work lives in the space between archive and erasure, language and aphasia, object and disappearance. It is a scavenger act: to sift through what remains of the past—and to burn it into glass.