Seafood Market

Since childhood, the seafood market within the Asian grocery store has been a site of profound contradiction for me, a place of family tradition and cultural connection, as well as a stark, fluorescent-lit gallery of mortality. I explore the unsettling dichotomy between the inherent value of a life and its assigned monetary worth. The central question driving my work is: who holds the right to price a life? With sea creatures stacked in ice beds, weighed and tagged by the pound, I document the moment their existence is quantified into dollars and cents. The brilliant colors and dynamic energy they possessed in the ocean are faded and replaced by the pallid hues of loss and the sterile geometry of commerce. This series challenges the viewer to confront the hierarchy of value we impose upon other living beings. Is a life more valuable for the joy, beauty, and uniqueness it embodies while alive, or is it defined solely by the benefit, contribution, and convenience it provides in death? The market becomes a brutal, honest theater where this question is answered daily without sentiment. Through these images, I do not seek to pass judgment but to provoke a necessary contemplation. I ask the audience to see beyond the transaction, to recognize the silent, beautiful forms not as mere products, but as former lives, and to reflect on the ethical and economic structures that govern our relationship with the natural world. This work is a eulogy for the color lost and a question posed to the scale upon which we measure a soul.