Remembrance: Attachment: First7 Tooth

First Tooth Acrylic on silk, 2023 Based on a family photograph, this painting depicts my sister during her Dentition celebration, a traditional ceremony marking a child's first teeth. She sits on the floor while relatives hold a cloth above her in celebration. I was never given such a ceremony, and I have no photograph from that stage of my own childhood. For years, looking at this image has been accompanied by a quiet sense of jealousy—not toward my sister, but toward a memory I never had. Repainting the photograph transforms that feeling into a reflection on family, attachment, and the unequal ways memories are preserved. Part of the Remembrance: Love and Grief series, the mirrored composition evokes the surface of water, where recollections become unstable and layered. Here, memory is not only what survives, but also what is missing—an absence that continues to shape the emotional landscape of the present.