This is a work in progress

My dad passing from Covid-19 was the catalyst. 

When he died I had to pick up all the pieces of his life including going through all his things. As I sifted through the monuments of his life I noticed a theme. Among the piles of unopened mail, branded work polos, and CDs were family photos, notes, and symbols of a missing heritage trying to be found. In many ways, this project is a continuation of my father’s unfinished investigation.

Generational trauma tends to create rifts in one form or another. As a child, my dad loved to remind me to be proud of my Asian heritage. I would follow these declarations with questions such as “Do we even know Chinese?” (No) or, “When did our family come to America?” (not clear). I don’t blame my dad for these lapses in our history; his mother left him when he was just 14 and he was trying to assimilate to a culture that caters to whiteness as a half-Chinese man. Our brains instinctively protect us from the worst of this trauma, so I also don’t blame my uncle for giving me the wrong maiden name for my grandmother for my father’s death certificate. What’s another mislabelled official document in a sea of mislabelled historical documents?

I’ve never met my grandmother but, after my father died, I found an article about her marriage to my grandfather. They were married in Brooklyn, New York, and planned to embark on a two-week road trip from New York to California, where he was stationed in the Navy. 

And there it is – the smallest thread for me to follow.

Displaced Inheritance is my way of placing myself at the intersection of my grandparents’ momentous road trip through the lens of my own experience. It is a way to extract joy from a family history wrought with generational trauma and allow me to explore unknown histories that will eventually help me create a narrative that feels like home. As a way to connect the two timelines, I will recreate the road trip my grandparents took after their wedding. Using a medium-format camera I will create images that give a sense of place and show the land of the Lincoln Highway. The photos will utilize historical markers that could have been visited or seen by my family on their trip: Shops from historical downtowns, old motel signs in various states of decline, rest stops, large trees that may have served as a picnic or camping area, or the land itself, touched by the industry of the time, or not at all. These images will serve as a way to represent my mixed asian-american experience as I have only been given access to – through art history and the internet. The land I travel through is the only thing that connects me to my tenuous family history. 

I will draw upon the use of non-traditional processes to visualize the intersection of time and place, by creating offset, transparent prints laid on top of archival-quality printed photographs.

The created images will also be displayed alongside other discoveries: surviving family photos, 23 & Me results, Ancestry.com trees, and newspaper clippings to create an all-encompassing story that places me firmly in my own found history.