Return to the Present We Never Arrived At

This project explores the lived experiences of the stateless Chinese community in Arunothai, Northern Thailand. Drawing on visual ethnography, the work focuses on individuals living in a state of legal “suspension”. Despite residing in this region for generations, their lack of official citizenship traps them in a perpetual transition—they exist in the physical present but are unable to arrive at a “future” defined by full rights and recognition.

Consisting of 21 A3-sized embroidered pieces, these “road maps” function as a sensory archive of migration, belonging, and the absence of identity. Each thread traces the restricted life trajectories of stateless people, attempting to reconstruct individual memories that have been rendered invisible by grand narratives. Through the embodied practice of embroidered cartography, the work asks: How does one define their “present” when, legally, they belong nowhere?

This counter-mapping textile series reconstructs territory and belonging through the visual language of traditional Lahu embroidery. Using a white cotton base as a field of unwritten possibility, the work layers black fabric as sedimented historical memory, while red and black threads stitch together an embodied cartography of trauma, resilience, and continuity.

By systematically deconstructing conventional map logic, the piece refuses both utopian nostalgia and future fantasies. Instead, it presents a geography where lived memories—marked in red—continue to ripple into the present, and where black-thread networks record the adaptive, improvisational knowledge of survival.

A spatial narrative of what it means to return to a present that has never yet fully arrived.