The Inner Tide of Bodies of Water —Living through Ancestral Memory and Celestial Time

In this thesis, I examine how postmemory is transmitted through material processes and embodied gestures, beginning with a family photo album brought from China to Canada. I analyze how sewing into photographs, papermaking with kozo fiber, and harvesting salt from the Pacific Ocean operate as modes of memory work through which intergenerational trauma is processed, embodied, and made materially present. Drawing on theorists such as Marianne Hirsch, Astrida Neimanis, and Gilles Deleuze, I explore how the body materializes loss, grief, and inherited experience through tactile labor. Through close reflection on specific artworks—including Hand Over What You Left Me, Slow Water, and Flood; Dry Land—I investigate materials metaphorical weight as carriers of memory, displacement, and transformation.Materials such as salt, water, paper, and driftwood become sites through which the body's relationship to time, history, and planetary cycles is reframed. Across the thesis, I argue that memory is not a fixed narrative but an evolving condition—shaped through environmental process and the permeability of the human body.