What Color Are the Trees Where You Are? examines memory and reconciliation with forced displacement. In this work, I utilize archival satellite imagery from Google Earth of the area I was born in China and project it onto the walls of the house I was raised in, in suburban New Jersey. In doing so, I asks what it means to visually collapse two places on across the globe that you feel perpetually caught between?

This body of work also engages the political history and ongoing tension between the United States and China, and how these dynamics ripple into the personal lives of individual civilians. When Google Earth lacks photographic coverage of a country, its algorithm stretches and warps two-dimensional satellite images to fabricate the missing terrain and simulate the perspective of a person standing there.

While the information Google Earth provides is not realistic, these distortions become metaphors for my relationship to origin as a transnational adoptee. Navigating this warped digital terrain becomes both a strategy of reaching toward origin and a form of self-delusion. The endless clicking through fabricated landscapes mirrors an endless search for clarity, even as I recognize the impossibility of finding it there. This paradox gives shape to the central question of the work: what color are the trees where you are?

The phrase comes from a drawing my mother made before adopting me, in which she sketched a tree and wrote the same question to me, imagined across distance. At the time, it was an expression of longing to connect with a child she had not yet met. In this work, I return to that question from the other side: reaching back toward a place I cannot fully access, asking the very same simple yet impossible question.