ENGINEER / PHOTOGRAPHER / BUILDER
I make thingsto see themmore clearly.
The tools keep changing. The habit does not: look closely, find the system, make it tangible, then look again.
Give me a moving subject and I will probably stay too long.
I am Xihe—Tom, most of the time. I am happiest when the subject refuses to hold still: an RC car between heats, an ensemble seconds before a cue, a pressure field around an airplane, or a city photographed at 1/30s.
Engineering and photography look separate on paper. In practice, both begin with attention, and both get interesting when reality disagrees with the picture in my head. Research, directing, and teaching are other ways I return to that same friction.
Same attention.
Different rooms.
Trackside
A model becomes useful when the car behaves differently. I like the loop between the bench, the stopwatch, and the next run.
OPEN THE THREAD ↗
In the wings
A performance is also a system: people, light, space, and cues converging on one moment that cannot be repeated exactly.
OPEN THE THREAD ↗
Reading a quiet boom
The curve became useful only after I looked for ways it could fail. Modeling taught me to ask not only what an answer says, but what the evidence can honestly support.
OPEN THE THREAD ↗I do not want one lane. I want a way of working that survives the track, the stage, the lab, and the people beside me.
Still building.
Still looking.
- BASED
- Shanghai - LA - Elsewhere.
- BUILDING
- A faster car—and a team that can keep improving it.
- STUDYING
- Low-boom flight, pressure as perception, and systems in motion.
- LOOKING AT
- Aircraft, cities, rehearsals, and the seconds before things become official.
- OFF HOURS
- Tennis, cooking, and staying at airports longer than necessary.