2026.5.25 - 6.7
Residency at SERDE in Aizpute, Latvia

Before I tell you about what I made at the residency, I would like to show you the beautiful meals on Finnair from Shanghai to Helsinki, which lasts 13 hours (and a half?). And then I lined up for 2 hours at the customs in Helsinki and took the flight from Helsinki to Riga. I got a lot of blueberry juice, but needed to hold the pee.

The house that I lived in is almost 200 years old. When I walked into my room on the first day, the suitcase started rolling. It is historical.

There is history everywhere, from Livonian to Courish, from German to Russian. (The Aizpute Castle dates back to the 13th century.) 
There is a lot of "pasts", too, which means post office in Latvian. 

Mysteriously, the first thing I wanted to make was fish.

But soon I realized that the fish bones I made looked more like from a slightly fatter mammal that had died from bloating.

About 3-4 days after my arrival, I learned from a fellow Latvian artist that the name of the residency "serde", in Latvian, means "core".

The first floor of the house used to be many different shops - candle, liquor, spice, insurance, fabric, bicycle, clinic, etc. And the second floor once housed “better behaviored girls”.​ Looking out of the window and hearing the trucks every day, I was thinking what I could “sell” as a "better behaviored girl", too.

During the open studio event, the locals joined a guided tour with me. We studied the barbershops in town and their skills to trim trees, practiced sitting on a bench in the middle of the road, learned to see fish flying in the sky, and jammed with a very old door.