This work is taken from the Polite Fictions series: manipulated re-photography of ceramic portraits from headstones in St. Michael's Cemetery, Hong Kong. These works attempt to understand the transformations of an individual's sentiment when it moves from one's private spaces into the public domain. They try to touch on the conflicts between domesticity and publicity, citizenry and privacy, agenda and gender politics, information and control, patriotism and dissent, and the relation of these conflicts to the manner in which they impact those who experience them. It is a play on the ways the expressive body reveals cultural codes, and the way cultural codes shape the perceptive body. It is also a play on the different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries, specifically within high context societies such as China or Japan, where direct confrontation is avoided, and evasion is preferred in order to keep appearances pleasant, thus creating - Polite Fictions.