When Soy Becomes Story is an artistic research that takes me home, Guizhou, China, where I learned soy dye’s history, symbolism, and how it’s passed through generations. This 400-year textile practice comes from when soybean is part of a local and family-run ecosystem where people grew the beans, made them into food, and used them in textile dyeing. In this process, soybeans are ground into fine powder and mixed with quicklime and water to create a resist paste that protects selected areas of fabric from absorbing colors. The notion of “resist”, both materially and metaphorically, means the textile technique but also a way to think about soybean’s capacity to confront the extractive narratives imposed on it by industrial agriculture.

I take the pieces back to the Netherlands, a landscape far away from soy’s origin but also entangled with soy, to continue developing the work through making and writing.

The project is kindly supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and QISSA.
Exhibited at BRUTUS Rotterdam from February to March 2026. 
Photo credit: Xaveer May