Rong Choy

An evolving body of work

WithOurLittleHands

The project explores how small actions, gestures, and acts of care shape who we become and the communities we grow together.

Straight-on view of the hand-painted Tend the Garden installation at Bellevue Arts Museum.
Tend the Garden, Bellevue Arts Museum, 2026

First presented July 24–26, 2026
Bellevue Arts Museum

Enter the garden

Grow, wander,
discover.

With Our Little Hands is a two-part immersive interactive installation by Bellevue artist Rong Choy, created for the Bellevue Arts Museum. This site-responsive installation invites children and families to explore how small actions can shape the world around them, and how action, creativity, and play shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Visitors are encouraged to draw, create, and leave their marks within a responsive digital environment, while a hand-painted botanical landscape rewards curiosity with light, movement, sound, and small surprises waiting to be discovered.

Inspired by the ways children learn through play and exploration, With Our Little Hands transforms the gallery into a space for wonder, imagination, and connection.

Recommended for ages 1–6 with caregiver supervision. All ages welcome.

Two young children smile together while families explore the Tend the Garden installation behind them.

A letter
from Rong.

Nothing really prepares you for the full-body, full-mind overhaul that comes with having a child.

One afternoon, after making my daughter cucumbers and carrots for a snack, I found myself hiding under the kitchen counter on the other side to eat a bag of chips. It was a ridiculous scene. There I was—a grown adult, hiding from a two-year-old because I didn't want her eating the very thing I was eating.

The question lingered long after the chips were gone: how do I help my daughter become the person I hope she can be?

Parenthood has a way of holding up a mirror. It asks not only what we want for our children, but whether we are willing to practice those things ourselves.

If I want my daughter to love herself, I must show her what self-love looks like. If I want her to speak her mind, I must be willing to use my own voice. If I want her to grow into a person who is confident, curious, and kind, I cannot simply tell her to become those things. I have to embody them.

Motherhood revealed a gap between what I wanted for my child and what I practiced myself.

Showing up matters. The small things matter. Every goodnight lullaby, every promise kept, every bumped knee and elbow and shin and knuckle kissed better matters.

The weight of that realization changed my relationship to art.

I began thinking about the countless ways children learn—not through instruction, but through experience. Through action. Through repetition. Through seeing what the people around them actually do.

With Our Little Hands is a two-part interactive installation exploring how children come to understand themselves through action.

Part one

Responsive digital media

Grow
the Garden.

The first work invites children to draw, paint, and leave marks within a responsive digital environment on the canvas provided. Long before children understand who they are, they discover that they can affect the world around them.

A cry brings a parent running. A warm handprint on cold glass leaves a trace. A scribble transforms a blank page. Through these small acts, children encounter a profound idea: I can cause change.

At the close of each day, the collaborative canvas is preserved as a finished painting: a lasting record of a community created, quite literally, with our little hands.

A young child paints a yellow mark on the collaborative canvas during Grow the Garden.
A visitor making her mark on the collaborative canvasPhotography by Ulara Nishitani

Part two

Kinetic sculpture, light, and sound

Tend
the Garden.

The second work reimagines Rong’s wooden botanical mindscape sculptures as an immersive landscape for shared discovery. Inspired by the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, families are invited to wander together—planting flowers across a mountain meadow, making stars twinkle, spinning the sun, sending blossoms dancing on the wind, listening to the rain, and uncovering hidden surprises woven throughout the garden.

Play is often dismissed as something children do before the real work of life begins. Yet play is how children come to understand the world. It is how they test ideas, build confidence, develop empathy, and discover what is possible.

Designed as a shared experience between children and the adults who accompany them, the landscape offers no instructions and no right answers—only invitations: to wonder, to explore, to linger, and to care. Each interaction asks visitors not simply to change the landscape, but to consider how their actions might help it flourish. In tending the garden together, children discover that the world is shaped not only by what we can do, but by how we choose to care for the things entrusted to us.

Together, these works reflect on a simple truth: our lives are shaped by countless small gestures. With our little hands, we comfort. We build. We create. We care.

And in doing so, we become who we are.

Made with
many hands.

With heartfelt gratitude to my husband, Zack Hsi, who greets wild ideas and last-minute scope changes with remarkable grace, and whose technical expertise, unwavering work ethic, and countless hours of problem-solving helped bring this work to life.

To my musical collaborators, Ian Kaneko and Steven Kim, thank you for sharing your extraordinary gifts so generously. Your music does more than accompany this work—it gives it breath, emotion, and wonder, carrying visitors into a space that words and images alone could never reach.

To my friend John Wang, thank you for showing up with your time, woodworking skills, generous spirits, and willingness to lend a hand whenever one was needed. Tireless artists assistants Milana Nokhrin and Vanessa Bauer, carpenter friends Ethan Goh and Chris Bentivenga.

With deep gratitude to Emily Tyler, and the team at Bellevue Arts Museum for championing this project, embracing ambitious ideas, and entrusting me with a space where families can gather, explore, and create together.

Threads of
the Garden.