A Kind of Magic examines photography as a space where memory, absence, and imagination converge. The project approaches the photographic image not as a record of the past, but as a site where personal and collective histories are negotiated and reinterpreted. Through this approach, A Kind of Magic proposes photography as a form of personal archaeology.

The work revisits Bandung, Indonesia—the city the artist left as a child when her family fled during the anti-Chinese violence of May 1998. Rather than depicting the riots directly, the photographs explore their lingering imprint through images of everyday places that once formed the landscape of childhood.

Photographed over a decade of repeated returns, these sites appear suspended in time. Memory reshapes perception and the boundaries between lived experience and imagination begin to blur. The camera becomes a tool for navigating the distance between the adult at present and the child who left home, allowing fragments of memory and fantasy to be reassembled into a visual narrative.

Emerging from the broader history of Chinese-Indonesian persecution during the 1998 riots, when thousands were forced to flee the country, the work ultimately proposes photography as a quiet act of resistance against historical erasure and forgetting.