The Unrequited Love Institute (T.U.L.I.)

The Unrequited Love Institute is exhibiting at Phoenix Art Museum through January 23, 2026.

The Unrequited Love Institute (T.U.L.I.) looks like any other office at first. There’s a reception desk, a number kiosk, bulletin boards, even an orientation video playing on an old CRT monitor. But then you notice the small things: the flyers, the fake plants, the self-help books. That’s when it starts to unravel.

T.U.L.I. is a fictional institute that claims to “refine” immigrants. It’s satire, but it comes out of my lived experience. All the ways, big and small, you’re asked to erase yourself to fit in.

Visitors take a number and check their place in line, only to find their wait time measured in decades. The orientation film feels like part infomercial, part bureaucratic nightmare. And then there’s the Self-Help Library, a shelf of books written for problems immigrants actually have.

The Institute also puts my personal projects on display as if they were artifacts from a time when immigrants were still allowed to tell their own stories. There’s My Mother’s Voicemails, twelve years of messages from my mom, all printed into a single spiral-bound book, like it’s some kind of corporate report. There’s Anxieties of an Immigrant Father, a wall of charts mapping my fears against my daughter’s age. And the Immigrant Clock, which ticks loudly but doesn’t actually tell time, it just keeps moving.

The exhibition also includes Number of the Day: 7,103, a wall of 7,103 tally marks, one for each day I spent waiting in the immigration system. In the Memory Archive, visitors choose what to remember and what to forget. Works like Oral History (of Us), a phone call to my daughter that shares hundreds of years of our family history, and Comfort Food, a recipe box and audio story I made with her about the role food plays in our relationship add more personal layers. Lifecycle of an Immigrant uses a lightbox and transparencies to trace how families evolve, assimilate, and sometimes disappear over generations.

T.U.L.I. uses the language of bureaucracy, but it’s not just parody. It’s also my way of talking about what it takes to hold onto who you are when every system around you is designed to wear you down.

The Unrequited Love Institute is currently at Phoenix Art Museum, where it’ll be up through January 23, 2026.

The Unrequited Love Institute team consists of: Amy Chou, Alex Cabrera, Ian Coyne, James Coyne, Josh Belveal and Zaara Saleem.

Photos by Samantha Chow.

Additional support from: Christian Ramírez, Chad Musch, Bethany Wearden, Paul Welden, Luu Dagda, CJ Mascarelli, David Lorello, Tenea Hudson, Peyton Bailey, Goolam Saber, Shachi Kale, Madeline Sayet, Po-Min Wang, June Jung, Deborah Sussman, Morton Scult, Tempe Public Art, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Define American, AAPI Civic Engagement Fund.