Sophia Wan is an interactive media artist and designer whose practice spans audiovisual performance, photography, product design, and installations. Drawing on themes of scars, memory, and collective trauma, she transforms both personal and cultural narratives into poetic forms of design and visual storytelling.
Her works range from live coding performances that merge sound and visuals in real time, to interactive toys, critical objects, and photographic series that reframe everyday experiences. By blending technology with human stories, Sophia creates spaces that invite empathy, reflection, and new possibilities for connection.
Artist Statement
Sophia Wan
2025
My core investigation revolves around collective trauma, cultural taboos, and gendered experiences within East Asian social structures. These themes are unified by their revelation of narrative vacuums under conditions of unequal power, demanding a response through empathy-driven design to achieve public resonance. While my personal history and family narratives form my initial research archive, my goal is to transcend private expression, elevating these individual accounts into collective echoes that reflect broader social structures and intergenerational connections. Art is a powerful medium to activate the senses and invite deep participation, allowing audiences to embody the stories being told.
My methodology begins with fieldwork-driven documentation, utilizing photography and filming to gather original data and ground the work in reality. I expand this into the spatial construction of "sensory storytelling," combining the materiality of handcrafted objects—such as needle-felted textiles, wood-based structures, and diary-like archival forms—with the dynamic tension of audiovisual media and custom-coded interactive systems. These multi-dimensional spaces are designed for cross-modal immersion, inviting the audience to move beyond spectatorship and become co-generators of narrative meaning. I frame my artworks as a social, open-ended project: their value is maximized when public engagement transforms them into continuously evolving sites of discourse.
A central challenge in my practice is negotiating the tension between archival complexity and interface accessibility. I continually seek more effective amplification mechanisms to broaden the social impact and transparency of my projects. My goal is to deconstruct neglected histories, re-authorize the narratives of vulnerable groups, and explore how technology can function as a catalyst for equity and psychological repair within the East Asian context. My work, while deeply rooted in this specific geography, aims to explore universal themes of vulnerability and structural inequality relevant across cultures.
Moving forward, my work will continue to investigate the relationship between individual agency and societal structures. Beyond traditional interactive media, I plan to critically integrate emerging technologies—such as AI generative narratives, embodied interaction design, and decentralized storytelling platforms—to conceptualize new frameworks for addressing complex socio-humanistic issues.
Ultimately, my practice seeks to design spaces where technology is not a tool, but a critical medium for empathy, social connection, and structural transformation.