artist statement

Chinese-Canadian poet, Fred Wah poses the question, “how voice the silent dash?” in his poem “Hyphen” from the collection Faking It. The hyphen, this so-called “dash”, is the bridge between Asian and Canadian in Wah, and in my own personal cultural identity as an American-born Chinese-Canadian. In Asian-North American literature, ambiguity in the use of genre becomes “noise” that acts as a means to voice a sense of belonging within this dichotomy. Hybridity, as the mobilization of the hyphen, stands for a literary metaphor and poetic tool that I am now attempting to translate artistically through the confl ation of different visual mediums.

Calling upon the inherent properties of the photographic and film mediums, and their associations with time and movement in the still and moving image, I attempt to blend oppositions analogous to my own culture bending. Through an examination of the representation of self, my work layers and fl attens binaries between representation and the represented, male and female, and ultimately feelings of alienation and connection, all of which are highlighted formally, and then conceptually debunked. In The Dance, photography and video are hybridized in a photo-based stop-motion animation. Playing the part of both male and female, I become the common subject in these layers of static images, forced into motion by the medium.

The definition of self as an empowering “I” is constantly at play with the camera’s “eye”. There is no direct translation of inner identity except in subtle hints of physicality that hinges on social and cultural associations. Variations after Mozart depicts the fragmenting of a self that is split in the search for cultural connection. I sight-read the music score to this canonic Western repertoire in mimicry of a perfect recording (and failing as such). More interesting is that the variation’s theme is a tune popularly associated with childhood songs of learning (“ABC”, “Twinkle Twinkle”) – the fi rst steps of language or cultural conditioning. Frames of intimate body-cropping are edited in play with time and duration of the music to hybridize the visual and the audio. The video aims to capture involuntary gestures of the inner-self as opposed to the conscious construction of self in front of the camera.

[Re]presentation involves a two-tiered concept of seeing that functions almost as a Möbius strip of visual paradoxes. Instructing my subjects to represent me from visual memory with an isolated light source, I am thus producing pictures of picturing. The “eye” of my camera becomes inadvertently refl ected as the “I” of my self. In these prints, hybridization of the hierarchical relationship between artist and subject comes in full circle, where control only lies in the formal technicalities of the photographic medium.

To me, border-crossing between oppositions becomes a metaphor for my culturally-mixed upbringing. The concept of hybridity expressed in these works mirrors my own transitions and translations between the spaces within myself. There is an intrinsic sense of displacement within the hybrid condition, and the hyphen is the signifi ed placeholder of this “inbetweeness”. Whether this is presented through obvious points of visual disjuncture, or by self-consciously exposing the art process, external and internal boundaries collapse to dismantle conventions, and encourage a “noisy” voicing of personal narrative.

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