The Cool Kids

The Cool Kids grew out of a mistranslation. During a high school assignment, I mistakenly translated “queer” as “cool kids,” a small error shaped by the Chinese term 酷儿, which sounds like "cool kid" yet carries a very different meaning. Over time, that mistranslation transformed into a metaphor for how queerness often enters social spaces—not through direct assertion, but through ambiguity, misrecognition, and reinterpretation. The photographs embrace this space of fluid meaning, treating identity not as something to be declared, but as something that emerges relationally, quietly, and sometimes obliquely.