To Steep Together – Jocelyn Ni
To Steep Together
Jocelyn Ni
Jocelyn Ni is a Chinese-American interdisciplinary artist. She creates using a variety of media to capture the nuances and complexities of immigrant experiences. She is drawn to painting, installation, and digital media as a surreal visual syntax to explore the tension between comfort and discomfort, finding beauty in pain and vice versa. Ni combines all three media in her temporal paintings, which feature recorded timelapses of digital paintings that transform the process itself into a narrative art form and arbiter of meaning.
As a second-generation immigrant, Ni emphasizes the importance of cherishing connections and embracing those like and unlike oneself, with a thematic undertone of mental health, empathy, and hope for growth. She seeks to break down model minority myths about Asian peoples and offer a humanizing view of all immigrants in light of the ongoing hatred of foreigners in the United States.
Hailing from Nashville, TN, she graduates from Vanderbilt University in May 2025. Her first major group exhibition is currently showing at the prominent Frist Art Museum as part of the Enough to Go Around juried exhibition exploring food justice and community.
About the installation:
In To Steep Together, I expound on cultural assimilation and the complicated search for connection. For my parents immigrating to escape poverty, and me by extension, there was pressure to conform to American society by distancing ourselves from our culture. It can take a lifetime to stop seeing one’s differing roots as a detriment and to find solace in any heritage not lost. In this work, I actively reconnect with my culture to explore the strain and beauty of being intercultural.
I encapsulate this act in sachets of tea, a commodity that transcends borders, with traditions across communities globally. I carefully fold and sew teabags by hand, using pu’er tea from China. My family often shared pu’er during lunch, and it possesses detoxifying properties per Chinese medicinal traditions, so the tea is comforting and healing. By enclosing a meaningful part of my Chinese heritage within American packaging, I create a personal contextualization of this tea.
I share and drink the tea with members of my community. Each teabag carries the essence of its drinker, possessing unique stain patterns on the sachets and strings. These nuances hold memories of our time together, christened by the restorative act of sharing my heritage. The drunken teabags hang from an 8-by-8-foot, octagonal frame, referencing the lucky number 8 of Chinese culture, as part of a chandelier-like multimedia installation. To suspend the teabags, I learn to craft traditional Chinese macrame knots, which form intricate designs using a single string, symbolizing good fortune, longevity, and interconnections. The overall piecewise condition of the intercrossed suspensions harkens to the tension between having disdain for one’s background and a lingering ache, at the loss of language and knowledge that often besets those with migrant origins.
The frame contains a fabric screen, rear-projected with a video timelapse of digital painting. I use the temporal representation of painting to capture a sense of change, cyclicality, and mesmerization. Notably, I depict a tea plant growing in a spiral and flocked by birds, expressing nonlinear stories of roots, growth, and travel. This film recalls my past piece, Protopraxis I, a similar timelapse of circling turkey vultures. I am drawn to avian wildlife and their communal flocking behaviors. Migration is also intrinsic to many birds, evoking the universality of seeking safer lands. My language of spirals and birds reflects immigrant experiences and the unclear definition of “home,” a pressing matter for many around the world.
Below, a mirrored octagonal bamboo mat allows one or multiple viewers to rest, as the dried teabags enclose the space and steep the air with introspection. I contrast the delicately still installation with an active video to consider the peace and dynamism in longing for a home that never was, but creating something new, perhaps imperfect, but beautiful, nonetheless.
I often examine food and its role in community, like in my painting, Mama Cut It For Me. Currently showing at the Frist Art Museum’s Enough to Go Around exhibition considering those themes, this work depicts the cut skin of a red apple spiraling around the fruit without end. Immigrant parents often express their love by peeling and cutting fruit for their children, a gesture I found indicates silent sacrifice. Cultural divides, language barriers, or generational trauma hinder the communication between parent and child, and between immigrants and non-immigrants. To carve out a better life, immigrants endure in ways that no one, not even their children, knows the full extent of. I urge for immigrant stories to be heard, because many of those stories are built on nourishment and love. Even small acts, like sharing fruit or tea, restore connections.
The installation:
