communications for all kinds of social interactions. In Picnic on the Grass, the people presented in the work reside in the same time and space. However, each person's face, hands, and belongings require more intimate interaction. Those images are replaced by mirrors and the cut-outs are displayed separately in Picnic on Zoom. These fragmented and self-contained planes reflect the metaphors of virtual communications we utilize every day.

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During the pandemic, home has become one of the places where people stay for the longest time. Rooms consists of photo sculptures — multi-layered sheets of acrylic with photographic collages on them — that depict rooms in residential rental buildings in New York City. The project investigates the economics and architectures of rental apartment, and reflects upon the housing dilemmas of recent transplants to the metropolis: the nomadic lifestyle with frequent relocations and temporality of “home.” Each sculpture consists of 15 to 20 layers of plastic with multiple photographic elements depicting domestic items. Together the layers in one collage represent a singular room but it is one that is furnished with objects from multiple identically shaped rooms that are stacked up vertically in the same apartment building. By doing so, spaces are compressed and unfolded in which illusive depth and real depth exist at the same time. Working from Home shows the change and adaptation of people's expectations and understanding of "home" after turning parts of a home into workspaces. Ren invited friends to take photos of the work areas in their home and send them to her. Then she composed a new room with images from each photo. The final result is a close-up of a familiar yet strange indoor environment.

Ren also projects her emotions towards family and intimacy onto her work. She creates a number of images that are related to her mother’s unexpected departure. In Renovation, it is an empty room under a suspended renovation that carries the artist’s memory of living with her mother but has become vacant for a long time. The state of the room and the entire old house has therefore stagnated at its own moment. Ren adds old family photos onto the plane image of the room, bringing family members together in this stagnant time and space. Mountains, Trees, In-Between consists of three parts: an image of the artist’s grandmother sitting under a hundred-year-old tree at her nursing home; a few last pictures taken by the artist’s mother at a ruined temple tangled with trees; and several images taken by the artist during her therapeutic trip to Seda, a Buddhist holy mountain area in Sichuan, China. During the trip, she learnt that local residents believed in the celestial burial, in which the loved one’s body is placed on a mountaintop: While the soul ascends to the sky, the body is given to the vultures, and eventually, returns to earth and nurtures the trees. Mountains and trees have become the sentimental bond between the artist and the two generations, resting her griefs and longings.