Mischelle Moy’s pleasant and dreamlike photography pays tribute to her Chinese heritage

As the eldest child of Chinese immigrants, NYC native Mischelle Moy has “taken the reins to explore my family’s rich culture, history and tradition of the motherland”. It's a responsibility she’s brilliantly taken on while “simultaneously dissecting the American side of things”. To add to that, Mischelle works primarily with brands and small businesses that are female and Asian-American-owned.

And when we say work, we really mean work. Mischelle’s colour-heavy photographs are the result of her own prop sourcing, styling, photography and post-production. Working with “a lot of various textures in fabrics, toys, reflective materials and food”, she finds that “sourcing the right props and sketching out the concepts” takes the most time. It’s the set-building process and colourisation that she enjoys most – crating her visual rhyme and reason around cultural memorabilia like vintage Chinese cookbooks and i-SPY books. “This exploration into my Asian-American-ness is often translated into my work as I put my own modern style on tradition,” she details, “which in some ways is still honouring the past while creating new rituals.”