The mufflers, once functional objects, are recontextualized as metaphors for voices yearning to be heard yet stifled. By adding sound components, the artist invites viewers to engage with the sculptures on a physical level. The mufflers emit layered voices of women, mimicking the aggressive, persistent hum of car exhausts. This insert of humor, blended with haunting persistence, underscores the struggle to be heard, while also invoking the absurdity of trying to communicate through something as impersonal as a muffler.
Each sculpture is accompanied by subtitles that catalog the multiple English names the artist adopted throughout her youth since 1999—markers of adaptation and negotiation with cultural expectations and the pressures of assimilation. These names, once tools of adaptation, embody the emotional labor of negotiating identity, navigating the desire to belong, and reconciling it with the authenticity of self-expression.
The tension between the personal and the societal is reflected not only in the form of the sculptures but also in their uncanny appearance, straddling the line between the familiar and the foreign. Their distorted forms evoke a sense of discomfort and challenge the viewer to reconsider the boundaries of identity, objecthood, and belonging. The addition of humor, in the form of the mufflers’ mimicry of car exhaust sounds, serves as both a playful commentary and a poignant critique of societal expectations. The viewer is prompted to lean in, to lower their body, and, in doing so, experience the labor of listening—a metaphor for the immigrant experience itself: the constant adjustments, negotiations, and compromises that come with existing within contrasting worlds.
In Names I Had You Call Me, the physical act of engagement—both with the sculpture and its sound—symbolizes the ongoing struggle for recognition, understanding, and connection. The work inhabits a liminal space that resists easy categorization and challenges traditional notions of belonging, highlighting the tensions of living within multiple identities and the absurdities that arise in the process.