TifNg (She/Her) is a Cantonese-American photographer and cultural worker based in New York City. Her research and photo practice explore myth-making, Chinese celebratory and mourning rituals, and Cantonese family histories and archives. She is currently the Programs Coordinator at Magnum Foundation. She has curated exhibitions at Paris Photo, Photoville, and in grassroots organizing spaces across NYC. Her work is deeply rooted in community engagement and cultural storytelling.

My photography and art practice reflect on the quiet performances of family life—tracing its bounds, fractures, and secrets. A Cantonese Family Archive: Half-Wishing, Half Re-remembering is an ongoing body of work that holds a series of chapters of my family's stories.

In the current chapter—Wishing Well, explores objects, rituals, and the act of myth-making. Rooted in ancestral Chinese practices of celebration and mourning, the series draws from both my family’s archives and my own photographs to create photo sculptures. Through these works, I ask how objects hold our dreams, wishes, and spirits. How objects can become vessels for what we hope to preserve or send onward. 

This work began after the passing of my maternal grandfather in 2021. With Hong Kong and China’s borders closed during COVID, and being stuck far from home, I found myself searching for ways to grieve and celebrate his life through art-making. For three years, I worked with what I had with me: a small carry-on suitcase and a box of family photographs. 

I became drawn to the idea of smoke. Across many cultures, smoke is believed to carry the living’s wishes into the heavens. Whether blowing out candles on a cake or burning joss paper for the dead, smoke transforms our desires into something that drifts to a realm beyond ours. These photo sculptures are impermanent, and are made to be transformed, to take on another life beyond their material selves. For this series, I created my own joss paper suits and edible photo cakes from both found and personal archives that hold special meaning for my family. In this particular pattern on the joss suit, is a scan of a found dream journal from 1901. In this writer's dream, they describe a cloud that forms into a stairway into the heavens.