Our Sea (Your Ghost Haunts My Shores)

Our Sea (Your Ghost Haunts My Shores) is a collection of paintings and mixed media works by Eva Lin Fahey that explores the complexity of adoptee loss by drawing past and future ghosts into the messiness of the present. Fahey’s work considers how familial, geographic, and cultural loss follows her experience as part of the Asian adoptee diaspora. Layered with imagined ghosts and dreamt oceans, the imagery exists in a liminal world that grasps what-ifs, dreams, and longings — creating narratives of belonging that arrive and depart without answers. 

Growing up by the ocean, Fahey spent many hours wandering the shoreline and imagining the ocean as a path both connecting and separating her from her motherland. The shore serves as both an imperfect boundary and a shifting meeting point — a space in which personal and cultural narratives wash up, intertwine, and recede with the tide. With this exhibition, Fahey considers the gravitational pull of her history and invites viewers to reflect on their own intersections of identity and experience.

Artist Eva Lin Fahey was born in Jingmen, China during the One Child Policy (in place from 1979 until 2016). A transracial adoptee, Fahey became a United States citizen at age three. She is one of more than a quarter million children adopted internationally from China. Her work exists within the context of this shared experience of cultural loss, personal migration, and separation.

Fahey holds a BFA from UMass. She works as a painter and writer in Massachusetts. Fahey was a 2023 ValleyCreates Capacity-Building grantee through MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists program. Her work was recently featured in AGNI’s Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. Her work has been exhibited across Massachusetts and in El Dorado, Arkansas.