THE PORTRAIT READING
A metaphysical portrait of the unseen patterns underneath a life. Delivered as a bespoke, 70-page digital manuscript, synthesizing four ancient systems to bring deep coherence to your next chapter.
The Person Inside the Person
I spent nearly twenty years making portraits. I photographed campaigns for Gap, Estée Lauder, and Ralph Lauren. I once found myself at the White House with Michelle Obama. I made pictures of people who were already known for something long before they stood in front of my camera.
But the thing that interested me was never really the face.
It was the person underneath it. The one who appeared when the performance dropped away. When someone forgot to manage how they were being seen. When something true slipped through before they had a chance to put it back where it belonged.
I became interested in that space between who we learn to be and who we are underneath it all. The self we build to move through the world, and the quieter thing that was there before we knew we needed to build anything at all.
I don't think I ever stopped looking for it. I just changed where I look.
When the Systems Found Me
Looking back, I don't think I found these systems so much as I kept finding my way back to them.
BaZi (八字) was part of the world I grew up in. I'm Chinese, and it was one of those things that existed around me before I had any real understanding of the architecture underneath it. Astrology drifted in and out of my life over the years. Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數) entered my awareness when it was popular during my teenage years. And more than a decade ago, someone casually suggested I look into Human Design. I filed it away.
At the time, none of these encounters seemed particularly significant. They were little points of contact, scattered across different seasons of my life. I didn't know they would eventually become part of the same conversation.
That changed when my own life began asking questions I could no longer reason my way around. I started looking more closely at the patterns I kept encountering, especially in relationships, and at the distance between what my mind could explain and what something quieter in me already seemed to know. I wanted to understand what was happening beneath the surface of my own experience.
So I followed the breadcrumbs. I went deeper into BaZi, then discovered how Zi Wei Dou Shu added another dimension to what BaZi revealed. I returned to Astrology and explored Human Design. Each system had its own language, its own way of looking at a human life. But the deeper I went, the more I began to recognize connections I hadn't known how to name before.
It felt less like acquiring a new identity and more like remembering something I'd been circling for years. The systems hadn't suddenly appeared in my life. They had been there all along, waiting for me to understand what I was looking at.
When the Pieces Begin to Speak
A person is never just one thing.
There is the self the world knows. The self shaped by family, history, and everything it took to become who they are. There are the patterns they keep living out, the things they can't quite explain, and the quieter part of them that seems to know something the rest hasn't caught up with yet.
I use four systems to explore these different layers: Western Astrology, BaZi (八字), Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數), and Human Design. Each has its own way of reading a human life. What interests me isn't what any one system can tell me about someone. It's what happens when I look at all four.
Sometimes one system gives language to something another has already hinted at. Sometimes they approach the same person from such different angles that a deeper truth only becomes visible when I put them side by side. I'm not looking for four versions of the same answer. I'm looking for what I might have missed if I'd only looked once.
Gradually, a different kind of picture emerges. Not a list of traits or a description of who someone has been, but a glimpse of the deeper architecture running through their life: what they carry, what they're here to work through, what they've outgrown, and what might be trying to come into being.
What the Portrait Gives You
There are things we know about ourselves long before we know how to explain them.
A pattern we keep finding ourselves in. A feeling that the life we've built doesn't quite fit anymore, even when there's nothing obviously wrong with it. A part of us that keeps pulling in a direction we can't quite justify. We try to make sense of these things with the language we have, and sometimes that language only takes us so far.
This is where the charts become interesting to me. Not as a way to predict what will happen, or to tell someone who they are, but as a way of looking beneath the familiar explanations. When I bring the four systems together, I'm looking for the deeper thread: the connection between things that may have seemed unrelated, the reason a particular tension keeps showing up, the part of the story that has been there all along but hasn't quite come into focus.
And then, sometimes, something clicks.
Someone sees why they've spent years being a certain way. Why something that looks like a contradiction is actually part of their nature. Why the identity they've worked so hard to build might no longer be the one they're meant to live inside. It isn't always dramatic. Sometimes there's a laugh of recognition. Sometimes tears. Sometimes just a quiet pause, because the words on the page have found something they've known privately for a very long time.
That's the moment I care about. Not giving someone another definition of themselves, but helping them see their own life differently. Because once a pattern becomes visible, they finally have the room to decide what to do with it. What to keep. What to question. What they're ready to stop carrying. And what might be waiting for them beyond the person they've always known themselves to be.
SAMPLE PAGES
THE PROCESS
It begins with a few questions.
You'll fill out a short intake form with your birth details, along with a little about what's been on your mind lately. You might arrive with a question you've been carrying for years. You might be in the middle of a life transition, sensing that something is changing but not quite knowing what. Or you might simply be curious about what your charts have to say when they are read together. You don't need to have it all figured out before we begin.
The week of synthesis.
This is where the intensive work happens. Over the following week, I calculate and analyze your charts across Western Astrology, BaZi (八字), Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數), and Human Design. I am looking for the cross-system threads of the tensions, the repetitions, and the deeper patterns that emerge when these four languages speak to each other.
This isn't a report generated from a template; it is a bespoke commission. Every Portrait is written from scratch, for one person. I draft the manuscript two to three sections at a time, reviewing and refining as the architecture of your life takes shape, before moving into final proofreading and design production.
The Portrait arrives.
Within five to seven business days, your completed Portrait arrives by email as a beautifully designed, 60-to-70-page digital manuscript. Printed copies are also available if you prefer something to hold, mark up, and return to over time.
The manuscript moves through ten parts of a larger story: what you arrived carrying, the gifts and patterns that came with you, how your calling wants to move through the world, what you're here to experience and transform, and the exact season of life you're moving through now. We explore themes including purpose, career, relationships, receiving, and the unseen patterns asking for your attention.
It is a document to take your time with. You may recognize yourself immediately in certain passages. Others may stay with you for a while before their meaning begins to unfold.
Then, we talk.
After you've had time to sit with your portrait, we'll meet over Zoom for 30 to 45 minutes. This isn't another reading. It's a conversation about what you found in the first one.
We'll talk about what surprised you, what felt familiar in a way you couldn't quite explain, and what you're still turning over in your mind. Sometimes a single passage opens up an entirely different conversation. Sometimes there's a sentence that brings tears, or a moment when something finally makes sense.
There is no script to follow and no right way to respond. We begin wherever you are.
The session is never recorded. What you share, what you recognize, and what unfolds in that conversation stays entirely between us.
WHAT YOU’LL RECEIVE
A bespoke 70-page Portrait.
Your own 60-to-70-page digital manuscript, authored from scratch and woven from four systems: Western Astrology, BaZi (八字), Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數), and Human Design.
Rather than four separate reports placed side by side, this is one continuous exploration of the architecture beneath your personality. It maps the unseen patterns you carry, the forces that shaped you, what you are here to experience and transform, and what is beginning to emerge. It is a foundational document you can return to as you evolve, or whenever life brings you to another threshold.
A private conversation.
After you've had time to sit with your Portrait, we will meet privately over Zoom. Bring your questions, your surprises, the passage you can't stop thinking about, or the sentence that made you cry. There is no correct way to experience this synthesis. We begin wherever it takes you.
Investment & Availability
Because of the intensive, week-long synthesis required to author each custom manuscript, I currently accept a limited number of clients each month.
Investment: $3,668
Portraits are currently available for individual adults. Couples, Family, Young Adult, and Child Portraits are in development.
Your portrait begins with a few simple details. I'll take it from there and be in touch within 48 hours.