Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My creative practice explores intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Through a research-based, historical approach, I tend to archives, literature, and other forms of collective memory, and probe the role of visual representations in fashioning concepts of “self” and “nation.” I express this research through photographs, moving images, and text works that consistently rely on the atemporal and transformative grammars of the photographic image. As a fourth-generation Japanese/American, I am interested in histories of Asian/Pacific empire and militarization, in reciprocal desire and assimilation, and in racialized life as that which runs fragmented or fugitive across space and time.

While at Headlands

At Headlands, I hope to further develop a project that considers the racial and sexual valences of the historical incorporation and denigration—the absorption and denial—of the Asian/American subject. Through visits to Bay Area immigration archives and acts of performance captured on film, I am interested in exploring the subversive pleasures and promiscuous potential afforded to Asian/Americans, as those who remain both of and yet perpetually beyond the nation. The historic location of Fort Barry, as a relic of US militarization against the imagined threat of the Pacific, offers an apt site for the investigation.

Artist portrait by Elisabeth Sellke.