This series brings together Soft Weight, Quiet Burden I, and Quiet Burden II to examine how care operates not only as an emotional condition, but as a structuring force embedded within familial, educational, and social systems.

Across the works, wax and resin function as materials that both preserve and immobilise. Family photographs, preserved foods, and personal objects—such as red dates, beans, or everyday items from adolescence—are encased, suspended, and gradually obscured through repeated layering. This process reflects what Sara Ahmed describes as the circulation and accumulation of affect: emotions do not reside solely within individuals, but build up across time, objects, and relations. Here, what appears as tenderness, protection, or nourishment becomes materially fixed in a state that is at once stabilising and restrictive.

Drawing on relational ethics within East Asian familial structures, often informed by Confucius thought, the works consider how care is articulated through material gestures rather than explicit verbal expression. Acts such as feeding, preserving, and enclosing operate as forms of emotional labour, shaping subjectivity while quietly producing expectations, responsibility, and pressure.

The series is also informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary structures, in which power is internalised through repetition and normalisation rather than imposed through force. Within this framework, care is not positioned as separate from control, but entangled with it. Softness becomes a medium through which constraint is naturalised; preservation becomes a process that fixes as much as it protects.

Rather than presenting care as purely nurturing, the works approach it as a system in which intimacy and regulation coexist. In this way, care emerges not only as a form of support, but as a subtle structure that organises how individuals feel, behave, and become.