Tadpoles in the Swimming Pool is a 2-channel animated video installation that explores the suburban swimming pool as a site of resistance against the pressures of assimilation through a story of surprising resilience from my upbringing in a Taiwanese immigrant family in suburban New Jersey. The project reconstructs my childhood home in photorealistic 3D, co-opting the aesthetics of commercial 3D rendering to interrogate the role of contemporary image technology in distorting and propagating normative visions of the American Dream.

My childhood home had a swimming pool in the backyard, a hard-won slice of the American Dream for my parents, who had immigrated from Taiwan to New Jersey seeking economic opportunity.

My parents abandoned the pool after an accident before I was born, but they never drained it. The pool was a murky, overgrown blight; I was forbidden from ever going near it. All I knew of the pool was the sound of the night bugs, whose songs resonated impossibly loud and deep on summer nights.

One day, a property surveyor discovered that there were tadpoles living inside the pool. I realized that the songs I heard at night were not just the chirping of insects, but the crooning of bullfrogs, and the chorus of untold more organisms that had taken up residence in our abandoned pool.

I had viewed our pool as a mark of failure in my family’s quest for the “good life.” Instead, I realized that a living ecosystem had somehow sprung out of our failure to assimilate to a narrowly defined image of success.

Tadpoles in the Swimming Pool depicts these events in a 2-channel video installation, recasting the tadpoles as a symbol of vital resistance against a narrow vision of what it means to be American, dictated by systemic conditions.

The project reconstructs my childhood home in glossy 3D, co-opting the aesthetics of commercial 3D rendering to interrogate the role of contemporary image technology in distorting and propagating this vision.

One channel portrays a pristine swimming pool flanked by hydrangeas; in the other, a tableau of glistening fruits sprawls across an endless granite kitchen island. As the story progresses, signs of life emerge unexpectedly and uncannily from the sterile 3D images, finding resistance against the normative narratives that threaten to constrain them.