“We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril”
“We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril'' is a multimedia project inviting Asian-Americans to participate in reclaiming, and reasserting our own narratives, through telling our families’ stories of immigration, labor, discrimination, and resilience.
“We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril'' is a multimedia project inviting Asian-Americans to participate in reclaiming, and reasserting our own narratives, through telling our families’ stories of immigration, labor, discrimination, and resilience. In the wake of the deaths of multiple Asian women massage workers in Georgia on March 16th 2021, the American public has suddenly turned their focus to the rise of anti-Asian violence. We all know this racialized and gendered violence didn’t just start with the pandemic.
Asian Americans are invited to submit their stories - written, images, video, and/or audio. Participants are encouraged to submit family photographs, images of ephemera, and other heirlooms along with their story.
These recorded stories, images and art were shared at a free outdoor projection screening, supported by Asian American Arts Alliance this past Summer (2021) in Flushing.
CLICK HERE to check out photos from the projection screening on June 27th.
The projection was a culmination of stories collected in Flushing, Queens between April and June 2021. CLICK HERE to check out photos my story gathering event hosted by Flushing Town Hall in collaboration with Asian American Arts Alliance in June.
Check out the news segment aired on BronxNet Community Television about the outdoor evening projection. CLICK HERE.
For more information please email: unmaskingyellowperil@gmail.com.
Family Amnesia was presented as an Artist Spotlight by Magnum Foundation at Photoville Opening Night on June 3rd, 2023
The video screened was shot and edited by Hai-Li Kong, additional camera by Cal Hsiao. Still shot from the video.
Artist Spotlight: Family Amnesia invites viewers to learn about her Chinese-American family roots in the U.S. through her engaging and interactive zine. The zine explores her family’s multi-generational resilience and resistance through family photos, collages and short personal films. This zine also features work that will be part of her forthcoming art and photography book, Family Amnesia to published by Daylight Books in May 2024.
“Acts of Remembering” published in "Survivance" a collaboration between Guggenheim Museum and e-flux Architecture
Below is my visual essay, "Acts of Remembering" that was published in "Survivance" a collaboration between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and e-flux Architecture in May 2021. The essay debuts some of my mixed media collages I’ve been working on during the 2020-2021 pandemic year. Below are excerpts from the essay.
To read the full essay, CLICK HERE
Collages Featured in “in/stasis” at Artists Space as part of Whitney Museum of Art’s ISP (Independent Study Program) Exhibition (May 20 – 29, 2022)
New York, April 25–in/stasis brings together thirteen artists whose works attend to the attritional loss of community, land, and resources in the world around and beneath them. The exhibition approaches the experience of displacement in stasis, marking the ways displacement functions not only geographically, but also at cultural, temporal, and infrastructural levels. The exhibition takes up Rob Nixon’s proposal of “a more radical notion of displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss…that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it habitable.” Such displacements often occur slowly and over such long periods of time that they are rendered invisible and readily ignored. Through attention to these calamities, in/stasis seeks to represent and resist their devastating effects.
in/stasis presents work by Natalie Ball, Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, Carolina Caycedo, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Emily Jacir, Tomashi Jackson, Nadia Myre, Otobong Nkanga, Cameron Rowland, Farideh Sakhaeifar, Sheida Soleimani, and Betty Yu. The projects in the exhibition engage a range of subjects and geographies including: the changing boundaries and status of property in Sunset Park, New York; the Canadian Indian Act of 1876; river communities and the damming industry in Colombia; and the extraction of natural resources in West Africa. Each of the artists in the exhibition approach displacement as a critical political question, exploring the personal and institutional registers that structure, implement, and benefit from displacement. In addition to calling out perpetrators, they also call attention to rebellions against slow violence, led by those who fight against the social and cultural amnesia induced by displacement in stasis through sustained activism and protest.
Exhibition of Betty Yu’s Mixed Media Collages from the “We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril” (Photo credit: Steven Cottingham)
From Whitney/ISP Program’s “in/stasis” Exhibition Catalog
For more info about the exhibition CLICK HERE
The Collages
Below are some collages from this series “We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril” (working title). Chinese Americans have been in the U.S. since the mid 1850's yet we were seldom represented in photographs. Through my research of my family and found photographic archives, it's clear that little exists of Chinese Americans in photographs in the popular mainstream. When we are depicted, it's often through a western gaze that feels reductive, stereotypical and caricatures that are racist. Images that show our full and complex humanity are often absent in mainstream narratives, This can often feel like culture erasure. This project is re-inserting and reclaiming our narratives into the foreground.
A mixed media collage with archival and family photos. My grandfather came to the U.S. in the 1920’s as a “paper son” buying fake papers. He carried around a card with his Chinese name. The background is the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. 2020.
A mixed media collage with archival and family photos. My parents first lived in a small apartment in the Upper West Side when they first immigrated to the U.S. in 1972 joining my grandparents. They were always looked at as “perpetual foreigners”, even now after 50 years of being in this country. 2020.
“Dis/Relocation - from Hong Kong to Brooklyn” (2021)
“Grandma working at a food factory in Williamsburg Brooklyn #1, probably the 1950’s”(2021)
“Grandpa served in the U.S. military during WWII, while the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in place, grandma came later” (2021)