Cocoon

A collaborative project, between photographer Sherry Zheng and writer Michelle Wang, that delves into the Asian diasporic experience and identity through the metaphor of the 'cocoon'.

Cocoon is a collaborative project, between photographer Sherry Zheng and writer Michelle Wang, that delves into the Asian diasporic experience and identity using the metaphor of the 'cocoon'. The project explores the complexity of transformation and the tension between belonging and displacement. Paralleling photography and poetry, Cocoon offers an idiosyncratic and poignant visual and literary portrayal of these themes.

The collaboration draws from Sherry Zheng's existing photographic body of work similarly titled Cocoon. In this body of work, Sherry captures portraits of fellow Asian-identifying artists within spaces that visually embody liminality — their cocoons. These portraits, staged within intimate, generally private settings, act as metaphors for the often uncomfortable and uncertain terrains of their identity, belonging, and diaspora.

Influenced by Black American photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems and Deana Lawson, who use self-portraiture and environmental portraits to examine the Black American experience, Sherry has also been inspired by contemporary Asian-American photographers like Ramona Dai and Ricardo Nagaoka, who similarly confront the marginalised Asian-American narrative through their photographic works. In her process, Sherry engages in deeply personal one-on-one conversations with her collaborators, facilitating photoshoots in their bedrooms, family homes, and shared living spaces. These intimate environments reflect the mental and physical states of metamorphosis experienced by those who navigate multiple cultural identities.

Invited to participate as a collaborator in the project, Michelle began to respond with words, which developed into poetry. Rather than speaking for the experiences of the other collaborators pictured, Michelle explores some of her own experiences as a second generation Chinese-Australian immigrant, explicitly drawing on the physical transformation experienced by the caterpillar-butterfly within the cocoon, while simultaneously revisiting encounters, people and places that connoted significant moments of discomfort, uncertainty, and growth.

Through the substance of the writing, its phenomenological experimentation with form in the shifting voices adopted, and abstract visual representations of states of cocooning, Michelle’s poems add further layers of sensory heft and expression to the unspoken, complicated experiences of diasporic experience and identity conveyed through Sherry’s emotionally rich photography.  

Together in this photobook, Sherry’s powerful visual imagery and Michelle’s evocative poetry work in tandem to illuminate the liminal space of transformation. Both artists probe this crucial moment of change—an evolution from the unknown to the understood; a painful but necessary shift from liquid to solid. Their collaboration aims to create an emotional depth that captures the dynamic, multifaceted experience of diasporic identity, inviting viewers to engage in a visceral exploration of what it means to exist within these constantly shifting borders.

Attached is an early digital dummy arranged by Sherry herself. Cocoon remains an ongoing photographic body of work that Sherry continuously builds on. The pair are currently in talks with a local book designer to work on Cocoon's photobook design, with plans to use a Sydney-based printing studio to produce a dummy book by October 2025.