Creating

Go Groundshel! 🔗🔗🔗

A “Super Maria” puzzle adventure game in which a groundhog girl endeavors to save her male partner from the villain.

This game is on Steam and is still in development. It participated in the 2024 She Got Game program and was showcased on W Love Games Conference 2024.


The Ancestor Catcher (2024—) 🔗🔗🔗

An interactive game exploring the history of displacement and marginalization.

The game intertwines Hmong/Miao dialects, histories, religions, and identities with embroidery patterns serving as symbolic clues about resettlement. Field trips to Hmong communities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, California, Southeast Asia, and Southern China are being planned during our ideation process to ensure authenticity and cultural appropriateness.


The Long Escape (2022)

A tabletop role-playing game inspired by The Long Now theory.


The Creator’s Book (2022)

A playable zine that explores different worldviews by introducing a character, ‘you,’ into the worldbuilding process.


“小土璇” Groundshel (2021) 🔗🔗🔗

Groundshel is the protagonist of my work-in-progress indie game.

Groundshel is not only a great housekeeper but also an adventurer. In order to save her lover and defend her homeland, she packed fruits and decided to start a difficult journey.

A formal announcement will be made on a gaming platform when the game is ready to be released.


《灵犀》MythRhino (2021) 🔗🔗🔗

MythRhino is a design fiction that speculates the lack of intimacy among people in the future.

There are two imaginary worlds — the Dust Age and the Smart Globe — in the story. Privacy is a devalued surplus in the Dust Age while having secrets in the Smart Globe is a priceless experience. The Smart Globers crave encrypting their minds and the Dust Agers chase decrypting. And dreams will become the only portal for humans to build emotional connections with each other at that time.

A mysterious agency took the initiative and invented the device MythRhino. It helps match users according to their audio dream notes. After a period of time, the duos’ dreams gradually become in sync, and the user enjoys the process of coding and decoding visions with their dream partner.


《蛙娃》WaWa (2021)

WaWa is a fictional wearable device that is designed for children.

It plays the role of an imaginary friend, helps the young users document their daily inspirations and imaginings, and provides co-presence to them through collaborative storytelling.

They can access their recorded thoughts anytime to review their ways of thinking, contemplating, conceptualizing, and creating. This collection of information can also be used to analyze one’s subconsciousness and behavioral psychology.


《荔枝楼》Lychee Tower (2021) 🔗🔗🔗

A work presented on The Journey from/to Here: Residencies at Gazetteer-Novel (April – June 2021), Jiazazhi Library, Ningbo, China

Lychee Tower
Installation View of Lychee Tower at Jiazazhi Library, 2021.

The work includes archives, short fiction, a video, and illustrations. The installation’s three levels of seeing represent audience’s three layers of understanding about a place while they move closer from a distant location: Appreciating a blurred landscape, learning the local stories, and studying the place in an immersive environment.


The Enigmas at the Red Point (2020)🔗🔗🔗

A tabletop role-playing game designed to create a group therapy environment and foster togetherness for players to cure contagious phobias through storytelling.

By collecting and incorporating players’ imaginations into the game, players are placed into the roles of the residents, guiding them to contemplate the hidden dangers the community could possibly face and collaborate to communicate, investigate and resolve fears that the dangers may cause — through which it builds stronger community bonds. This is a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a non-profit arts service organization.


《愚公计划》The Foolish Old Man Project (2019)🔗🔗🔗

An artwork shown on 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \Architecture (UABB), Shenzhen, China.

The Foolish Old Man Project, Ruixuan Li, Mengni Zhang, Zhuoxi Song, Installation View 1, Performer: Kexin Wu, Photo: Ruonan Wang, 2019.

The multimedia installation, The Foolish Old Man Project, includes texts, illustrations, recorded dialogues, footage, as well as images generated under the cellular automaton logic. In addition, the interactive rules symbolize the algorithms of swarm collaboration and life planning in the story. By having visitors negotiate among themselves to complete tasks through moving the objects on display, the project’s concept of swarm intelligence is revealed. 


《红钩岸上的谜思》THE ENIGMAS AT RED HOOK (2019)🔗🔗🔗

Residency at DE-CONSTRUKT, Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York.

An illustration of The Enigmas at Red Hook – Goldfish

Attracted by Red Hook’s urban-retreat location and anti-Manhattan lifestyle, I took a residency at DE-CONSTRUKT to conduct research and collect oral history from the community. I adapted the regional stories and eventually created urban legends that are born from the neighborhood, so as to endow the final work with the locals’ common emotions and belongingness.

To narrate the complexity of residents’ desires, preoccupations and fears of this era, I blended my storytelling with manipulated images, audios, and found objects of Red Hook to fabricate contemporary myths which provide alternative readings of the neighborhood’s recovery after the tragedy in 2012 and waterfront development. It is a collection of fairy-tale-like visual essay, a multifaceted city profile, and a veiled elegy.


Game of Presidio (2015)

An board game inspired by the public arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is my individual project. Time: April 2015.

Game of Presidio is a board game based on the northern part of Presidio, San Francisco. It is designed for citizens who want to participate in planning the city’s landscapes. Selected local artists’ large-scale sculptures / installation arts are presented in this game, so that players could place the works on the map and show their preferences. Therefore, Game of Presidio is a platform for local artists to have their works exposed to the public. Also, for the management level of Golden Gate National Park Conservancy, it is a way that they can know about both artists’ proposals and the public’s opinions.