I am a PhD candidate at the department funded by the LSE PhD studentship. From 2021 to 2023, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have conducted 22 months of multi-sited fieldwork with people living with dementia in both rural and urban areas in southern China. My research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology and anthropology of kinship, care, aging and memory.
My main research focus is two-fold. Firstly, I look at how different sectors of dementia care, including families, institutions, and community-based organisations, interact with each other as a contested network of eldercare. Such unevenly yet rapidly evolving care landscape is impacted by the increasingly precarious socio-economic prospect and the erratic political environment in China, especially during a time of global pandemic and economic decline. Secondly, my project provides in-depth ethnographic accounts of embodied experiences of dementia at home and beyond. I examine how personal and collective histories may be entangled in opaque, often misunderstood, symptoms of the illness, such as hallucinations, nightmares, and disordering of memories.
Apart from my academic research, I have been engaged in the contemporary arts scene through collaborations with artists and my own artistic practices and writings. I have been exploring printmaking as an alternative ethnographic method and my woodprints are presented at a group exhibition in Basel, 2025. I participated in the Singapore Biennale 2022, which resulted in the publication of a co-authored fiction story and an exhibition in New York, 2023. I also write reviews on art exhibitions for various Chinese media outlets, including recently one on children’s games and one on historical truths of the Chinese diaspora in Thailand.
I was awarded the Alfred Gell prize during my MRes in Anthropology from LSE. I also hold a MSc in Social Anthropology from LSE and was awarded the Maurice Freedman Prize for my dissertation on the relationship between kinship and Alzheimer’s. Before starting my journey in anthropology, I was a trained multi-media journalist, and I hold a BA in International Journalism from Hong Kong Baptist University.