Rooted

In 2025, my fourth year of Cibap during the study International Creative Business Development. I have worked on my own project.

I was adopted myself and became deeply aware of the impact adoption had on me when I turned 20 in November 2024. Through my ProYou project, I wanted to explore that feeling— both to better understand myself, adoption and to connect with others. There are many misconceptions about adoptees, and with Rooted, I hope to make people think about the topic in an accessible way.

In my research, I interviewed 13 adoptees from China and Taiwan. While most did not explicitly mention a feeling of emptiness, they expressed related emotions, such as identity confusion, uncertainty about their background, and a sense of not being “enough.” Many shared feelings of not truly belonging anywhere, struggling with self-acceptance, or wishing they looked “more Dutch.” Although many described a positive childhood, they were often unaware at the time of adoption’s deeper emotional impact. Rather than emptiness, they described feeling “different,” caught between cultures.

Rooted represents the complex experience of adoption: a longing for connection, the attempt to rebuild identity, and the feeling of existing between cultures, never fully grounded in one place, yet always trying to be. This set consists of 12 pieces: two base platforms with vertical poles and 10 stackable blocks.

The design reflects how adoption breaks a part of your identity, being separated from your biological parents and culture, and how adoptees often rebuild themselves using elements from both their birth and adoptive cultures. Dutch symbols like Carnival and King’s Day contrast with stereotypical Chinese elements like a rice hat or traditional dynasty dress. Stacking the blocks represents reconstruction, but also the reality that, despite efforts to belong to both worlds, many adoptees never fully feel at home in either.

Rooted is a visual and tactile expression of this complex experience. Based on personal stories. Designed to make space for conversation.

Part of proces: