A Conversation with the Archive
Project funded through a grant from the Brown Arts Initiative
Artist Statement
In the Spring of 2021, I was awarded the Brown Arts Initiative Student Grant to pursue a personal art project. Over the pandemic, I rediscovered an old hard drive that my parents gave me before going off to college. It was filled with old photographs documenting their lives from their childhoods in China in the early 70s all the way up to the first few years after they migrated to Mexico City in the mid-90s. Feeling a nostalgia for a past that wasn’t fully mine, I wanted to explore these ideas of generational and collective memory, and the ways in which the diaspora interacts with this dissonant information.
My memories of China are fuzzy smells, tastes, and flashing images. This book aims to create a conversation between the fragmented archive of my parents’ past and my own fragmented understandings of it. As the archive talks to me in splintered realities, I reply by filling in the blanks with my own experiences. Through this work, I attempt to take these loose dissonant pieces of our past and anchor them to each other through a conversation in the simplest of terms that empowers and reclaims our unique history, community, and identity.
Timeline
April 2021 - June 2021
Project Sponsor
Brown Arts Initiative
Medium
Family Photo Archive
Digital Illustration
Software
Procreate
Adobe Indesign
Adobe Photoshop
Full Book Download
Extending
the work & methodology
After finishing this project, I was able to continue exploring the use of the family archive and generational memories as source material for my art. In the Fall of 2021, I created a short graphic essay on my parents’ migration to Mexico City that was catalyzed by their earthquake research. This was a project for a class on the politics of graphic memoirs. Through this project, I wanted to explore the ties between earthquakes, academia, migration, and mortality.
