Promises To Children Are Sacred

(bedsheet, vegetable dye) intertwines and encodes the texts of unkept promises.

The numbers, shapes, and colors in this work are a cipher of unkept promises on three scales: global (a COP26 speech), local (a school's letter to families), and personal (a love letter).

This work was displayed at the 2024 RISD Digital+Media biennial exhibition "They Keep Changing the Key" alongside a projector that displays hints to decoding the cipher.

photos by Jingwen Cao