American pop culture colonized my imagination when I built up my worldview. After more than two years of living in the United States, I had first fixed psychological distance with my surroundings, as a way to make myself comfortable. However, I am still living in the America of my imagination, an America based on illusions from movies. It is so unreal and thrilling when I slowly approach the those objects and spaces. I can’t even tell if it is happening in reality or it is just a scene from a film, a lucid dream, or even my mind playing tricks on me. The sense of trance, the uncanny and absentmindedness directs me to a the margins. I could live in a matrix, like a brain in a vat. I could also be a boy waking up from a computer desk, while the movie is still running.

• 2021 MFA Spring Thesis