Home, Church, Sweet Love (2025) emerged from the artist’s experience of physically pressing her body weight against iron rods while operating human-scale grinding machines in hardware factories. The demanding process recalled her childhood within the collective industrial landscape of Northern China, while also connecting to her later experiences as a young student navigating Western cities, where she frequently encountered hostile forms of urban architecture designed to deter pigeons and unhoused people.

Bringing these memories together, the artist developed a series of metallic objects that exist somewhere between public architecture, furniture, and sculpture. Each steel spike was individually hand-ground from raw iron rods by the artist and her female studio assistants in hardware workshops, embedding physical labor directly into the making of the work.

Distributed throughout the gallery, the forms appear to gather, repel, occupy, and negotiate space with one another, creating an environment of palpable yet ambiguous tension. Through this spatial language, Home, Church, Sweet Love considers the ways public space can quietly regulate bodies and marginalize those perceived as “other,” while asking who becomes most acutely attuned to danger when moving through systems governed by rules, boundaries, and exclusion.