“Yellow Peril” is a xenophobic, racist color-metaphor that refers to the existence of Asians in Western territory and culture.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the color yellow.

When I was around 5 years old, I use to carry a yellow rubber ducky with me everywhere. It was my favorite color and my favorite toy. One day I dropped my rubber ducky in the subway tracks and that was the end of my ducky.

Growing up in America, I constantly struggled between the intersection of being Asian and being American and found myself living on the verge of never fitting in. As I got older, I began to reject my love for the color yellow as I saw the increasing want to need to fit in and saw myself drifting towards the conventional “female” or “male” colors–blue and pink. My favorite color switched back and forth throughout the years before I eventually found myself naturally gravitating towards yellow again.

In the wake of the recent rise in Asian representation and media, I found myself exploring my relationship with yellow. For my “5 in 5” project, I decided to constrain myself to something I once loved–the color yellow.

For my first project, I found myself exploring the idea of the self-portrait through inanimate objects. I did a still life study of some of my favorite objects.

Self Portrait | 2018

Gouache on Paper | 11×14