Art at the edge of what we inherit

About Hanalei

I am interested in the points where systems impact the most intimate parts of our lives.

My work sits at the intersection of intimacy and infrastructure. Through digital ritual, installation, essays, and participatory media, I make things that ask how abstract systems — immigration law, economic precarity, digital platforms, bureaucratic categories — reach into the most private portions of our lives.

What I'm asking is: who are we outside of our labor power and the commodification of our attention? What happens when sacred spaces become sites of extraction and control?

I've spent most of my life moving between places that each claimed some part of me (Jersey City, Manila, Honolulu) and that experience of being multiple and also illegible, of being "significantly othered," runs through everything I make. The diasporic condition is not a metaphor in my work. It is the actual architecture.

The acceleration and availability of technological life has not replaced the hunger for real intimacy, for being witnessed, remembered, held. It has made that hunger more acute and harder to satisfy. The internet once had a number of safe third spaces for the most marginalized communities. However, it is increasingly a site of surveillance, monetization, and managed attention. The systems that now govern the most ordinary moments of our lives are deeply shaping how we grieve, how we love, how we organize, how we remember. My work tries to create the conditions for witnessing inside those systems. Not to resolve the tension between intimacy and infrastructure, but to name it clearly enough for critical discernment.

I build out data sets because what gets archived is a political act. I make community frameworks to sharpen the questions one should ask. I build for the internet because it remains one of the last commons.

The work is an attempt to carve out intimacy and authentic connection in conditions that are not designed for it.