Series: The Invisible Asians
Title: The Protestor
Year: 2020
Medium: photography | digital print (or dye-sublimation printing on aluminum)
Dimension: variable (sculpture), 11 x 17 in each (photography)
This series of photographs captures a flesh-like silicone piece symbolizing the Asian American figure and posed around a white marble pedestal. The series explores the complexity of solidarity and racism between Asian Americans and Black Americans through the background of the Black Lives Matter movement. In these silent images, this abstract figure uses its thin but persistent physical action to push, occupy, and stand with its back against a white marble pedestal, which is usually used for colonial statues. Its face is blurry and stays anonymous to reflect how Asian Americans have not been acknowledged in American history and how racism against Asian Americans has also been ignored.
While transitioning my identity from an Asian immigrant to an Asian American since 2019, I have learned that I am not able to escape racism. I have thus had no choice but to join the protests and the reckoning of racism’s present and past in this country.
