The collective blog of the Museum of Chinese in America. Currently posting: Comics! In conjunction with a season of comics exhibitions at MOCA, we are pleased to invite you to join our drawing contest! Submit a drawing of yourself as a superhero. We will post your drawing on this site and our curators will select a winner each month. Great prizes to be won!
As part of the critically-acclaimed MOCA exhibition America through a Chinese Lens (April – September9, 2012), a survey of photographs depicting American life as shot by Chinese and Chinese American artists, documentary photographers and non-professionals, we used MOCA’s tumblr page, Scrapbook MOCA, to expand on the show’s themes and engage with our online audiences.
During the run of the show, new media artist and design strategist An Xiao shot and posted photographs regularly as she traveled throughout the west and southwest, offering a live visual essay about her America on our tumblr page. Inspired by that project, we surveyed our staff and volunteers for reflections on their America as seen through a family photograph. Here’s a photo in the series My America from Gerald Lam, one of our Young Professionals:
I was surprised to find this picture on my parents’ mantle. Not just because their spartan aesthetic rarely includes wall decor. But because it was a rare display of emotion. A subdued, quiet display but a display nonetheless. On the left is their recently remodeled home. On the right is the house as it stood for over 50 years. In their own controlled way my parents are proud. Proud that, finally, after decades of hardship and sacrifice, they’ve “made it” - the home was and is the grand token of success for many Chinese immigrants. I often wonder what that token is for my generation.
It’s been a special journey for me as I’ve participated in this project. I started shortly after returning from my first extended stay in Asia as an adult, and I returned to the United States with fresh eyes and a searching mind. These photos, in little ways here and there, have reflected that.
The more fellow travelers I meet, the more I realize that our journey is at once geographical as it is psychological. The wanderers I meet are searching for something. They pick up tiny somethings with each stop, and those somethings accumulate and gather with drops of meaning. Maybe, if they’re lucky, they learn to stay still. Sometimes, if they’re lucky, they never stop searching.
I am a traveler, at least for now. As I get ready for my first extended stay in Africa, I remember that my earliest memory is on an airplane, somewhere above the Pacific Ocean. I am happiest in motion, whether the roads are paved or dirt, waterways or jet streams. I want to see new lands, breathe new air, meet new people.
My posts with the Museum of Chinese in America end here. (That sounds like the end of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and I guess that’s fitting.) After snapping photos for this project, I still don’t know how to define the lens through which I see the world. But I know it’s my lens, and I’ll continue to take photos for as long as I have access to a camera.
Thanks for joining me these past few months. As exhilarating as it is, travel is lonely at times, and it’s nice to bring friends with me on my journeys. I hope we cross paths again soon.
An Xiao Mina
September 2011
As this project winds down, I’ve been thinking more about what it means to see America through a Chinese lens, or my lens, at least. And when I think, I like to spend time by the Pacific. I look west, where my ancestors once looked east.
I’ve realized in the scope of the project how much of a traveller I am. It’s in my bones, in my blood. I love to see new things, explore new worlds, set foot on new journeys and adventures in this big world. And in the social networking age, I can share what I see.
Recently, I looked out on the ocean, but then I looked up, and I saw this kite. Sometimes I wonder if the kite is me, flying free out there but tethered by the messages I send home and ping around the world.
I am standing by the ocean, a relatively unknown portion of the California coast where tide pools reveal themselves at low tide. I like poking through tide pools, carefully navigating rocks and shallow pools in search of starfish, sea slugs, anemones and hermit crabs and the like. Then, when the tide rushes forward as the moon pulls in overhead, they disappear beneath the sea, and it’s as if they never existed.
Marina del Rey, Los Angeles.
How we do.
Sunset Blvd, Silverlake.
LA is a town of abandoned mattresses. They’re hard to take pictures of, because usually I’m zipping by in a car. I found this one in Silverlake.
Hot pot with milk and roses. So so good and unexpected. Only in California?
