Walk with My Dog

2025
Artificial scents, ultrasonic distance sensors, humidifier modules, micro-controllers, 3D prints, concrete, acrylic, springs, metals, clay, dirt, grass, tube, printed sign, sock, bone, plastics, paint, videos, projector.
Various sizes

“Walk with my dog” explores the artist as a heterogeneous subject who, during the process of migration, sees her family member dog remaining in her homeland as a link to past identity. By imagining the everyday behaviour of walking with the dog in highly industrialized urban spaces, this work reveals the complexity of dogs and humans negotiating daily life and establishing kinship on their species’ own terms, as well as the distinct limitations they each encounter. Through the lens of urban political ecology, it examines how dogs and heterogeneous groups, as a ‘unit ontology’, are naturalized and categorized by patriarchal or colonial powers, and the artist’s paradoxical state in facing the resulting domestication and disciplining.

This work features concrete crosswalks arranged in random directions, with six interactive sensors placed within numerical form enclosures that release smells as audiences pass by—these are smells the artist’s canine family member typically stop to sniff during walks, such as the odor of dog feces, grass, and trash bins. The enclosures, along with other elements symbolizing constraints like fences and stop signs, are placed at varying heights and positions, creating an improvised, inherently bounded space. However, as humans and dogs move through the installation together, their vastly different ways of perceiving and experiencing the world become apparent, placing them in two entirely distinct umwelts. At the entrance to the installation, an acrylic panel reminiscent of a city’s structure is suspended, onto which the artist projects footage of herself and her canine companion walking separately in Chicago and Shanghai; the two sets of footsteps and urban landscapes blur together on the acrylic surface, providing visitors with an initial key to interpret and enter the work.