The Fortune series examines how meaning migrates—across language, geography, and time. Fortune cookies, long mistaken as an emblem of Chinese culture, were in fact born from Japanese-American adaptation. This quiet misunderstanding becomes the conceptual seed of the work: a study of how symbols detach from origins and acquire new lives in translation.

Red soy sauce dishes cradle fortune slips in multiple languages—messages without cookies, fragments without context. Each phrase floats between familiarity and estrangement, its meaning refracted by the viewer’s cultural lens.

Through repetition and displacement, Fortune transforms everyday objects into linguistic artifacts. It asks: when the sign and its referent part ways, what remains? Perhaps what endures is not the meaning itself, but our human impulse to search for it—again and again, in every language we speak or inherit.