Qiang Hu, PhD Student, UC San Diego

From Family Albums to Public Archives: A Close Study of Vernacular Photographs in exhibition Growing Up Asian

Vernacular photography, particularly family photographs, has long been a site of personal memory-making. This presentation explores how family photos function beyond the private sphere, emphasizing how their transition from personal spaces to archival institutions alters their emotional resonance. To contextualize this discussion, a historical overview of vernacular photography will be introduced, emphasizing vernacular photography’s intrinsic connection to Asian American communities. The presentation will then follow with challenges and difficulties for the construction of such narratives in the discussion on vernacular photographs’ circulation where they lose connection as personal objects and reconfigured as public record accessible to viewers with no prior knowledge. Extending beyond the general conception of archives as the intermediary resource between the private and public, this discussion addresses the limitations of archival spaces—perceived as cold and restrictive environments stripping away immediate sensory experiences of the photographs. To illustrate strategies for reestablishing personal connections, examples from the recent exhibition Growing Up Asian at Skyline College Art Gallery will be examined, demonstrating strategies adopted to recreate the intimacies. This presentation highlights how such approaches create alternative modes of belonging, positioning vernacular photography as a powerful site for negotiating Asian American identity, memory, and visibility.

Stephanie Tung, Byrne Family Curator of Photography, Peabody Essex Museum

Charles Wong and the Language of Photography in Asian America

In the summer of 1953, Charles Wong’s photo-essay “1952 / The Year of the Dragon” was published in the fourth issue of Aperture. The piece was a carefully designed sequence of photography and poetry that explored the complex emotions that arose in the wake of an extortion scheme that plagued the immigrant community in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The themes of Wong’s work – immigrant displacement, vulnerability, memory, and intergenerational trauma – reveal wounds of the Asian American immigrant experience that feel no less raw today.

In this paper, I contextualize Wong’s photo-essay within the early years of Aperture. Wong was a student of Minor White at the California School of the Fine Arts, alongside fellow Chinese American photographers Benjamen Chinn and Ernest Louie, who all published or were involved with the design of the magazine. In the same issue, White also asked his students to photograph Chinatown and create a collective photo essay “as a contribution to human understanding.” In exploring the juxtaposition of these multiple visions of Chinatown — one intensely personal, the other in the humanist documentary tradition — I examine notions of place, belonging, and the San Francisco social circles that shaped ideas of American photography in the 1950s.

Boyoung Chang, Assistant Professor, University of Alberta

Facades and Thresholds: Space, Identity and Engagement in Second Generation Asian Photography

This study examines how second-generation Asian photographers navigate and document liminal spaces of identity through their artistic practice, focusing on the works of Diana Yoo and Tommy Kha. By analyzing their distinctive approaches to photographing facades, boundaries, and intersectional experiences, this research reveals how these artists challenge conventional representations of diasporic spaces and hybrid identities. Through Yoo’s Inconveniences (2023) and Convenience Store Counters (2016), the convenience store becomes a critical site where Korean Canadian identity intersects with colonial histories and capitalist structures. Meanwhile, Kha’s self-portraiture series employs “photographic limbs” and “side glances” to destabilize fixed notions of Asian American and queer identity in the American South.

These photographers transform everyday spaces and personal archives into sites of critical engagement with cultural memory family history, and social boundaries. Their works reveal complex negotiations between inside/outside positions – evident in Yoo’s examination of commercial spaces as zones of cultural interaction and Kha’s reconfiguration of the family album format to explore post-immigration experiences. Their work contributes to a broader understanding of how second-generation immigrants actively reshape and redefine diasporic identities through photographic practice, creating visual strategies that challenge traditional documentary approaches while engaging with questions of belonging, memory, and cultural translation.

Hamin Kim, PhD Student, Boston University

Walking through Shaky Grounds: Identity, Intimacy, and Urban Loneliness in Joo Hwang’s 1995–96 East Village

This presentation examines Korean photographer Joo Hwang’s 1995-96 East Village (2023), a photobook that revisits her early female portraiture in 1990s New York. Through a close visual analysis of the three series—Eol-Gool (Face), Stranger than Paradise, and No-Re-Bang (Karaoke) along with insights into the book’s production process—including the choice to compile these images two decades later, editorial decisions, and interviews with the artist and the editor—this presentation considers how Joo Hwang’s images articulate the complexities of Asian female identity and belonging in an urban diasporic context through the materiality and semi-permanence of the photobook that serves as a tangible archive.

Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s concept of “tactics,” this presentation examines Joo Hwang’s solitary journey as an artist, highlighting her focus on the everyday experience of the Asian female body in New York—a perspective that veers from despair to quiet resilience. Within the city’s transient urban landscape, Joo Hwang’s portraits capture the fleeting moments of temporary solidarity between the artist and her subjects through the camera lens. Additionally, the geopolitical specificity of New York accentuates urban isolation and explores the intimacy the artist captures with her subjects who are also young Asian women.

Elena Tajima Creef, Professor, Wellesley College

Notes on Creating a History of WWII Japanese War Brides in Photography: Or How I Crowdsourced a Visual Archive from Scratch

As we officially entered the global pandemic in 2020, I was asked by the curators of the University of British Columbia’s exhibition, Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography, if I could contribute a “History of Japanese War Brides in Photography.” Without hesitation, I accepted—knowing full well that no such history actually existed. So I created one. Historians estimate that over forty thousand Japanese women entered the US in the post WWII decades as wives of American servicemen. The majority married mostly white and non-Asian servicemen of color. Once they arrived in the US, the brides visually vanished only to surface (briefly) in the pages of a few magazines and two Hollywood films in the 1950s. While their history has been haunted by invisibility, I created the first digital archive of War Brides crowdsourced from shared family photos as a result of working with an extensive network of online social media groups. My goal has been to bring these women into focus as worthy subjects of Japanese and American history and photography and showcase what happens when we bring private family photographs into public view in the form of a collective project.

María Beatriz H. Carrión, PhD Candidate, CUNY The Graduate Center & Assistant Curator of Photographs, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Pictures of Belonging: Carlos Andrade’s Studio Portraits of Chinese Panamanians

From 1854 through 1914, Panama welcomed a large number of Chinese immigrants. Hired to work in the construction of the country’s railroad and transcontinental canal, these workers played a fundamental role in the materialization of these massive infrastructural projects and in the formation of Panama’s identity as a modern, global nation. Thanks to their entrepreneurial spirit, Chinese Panamanians quickly became an integral component of the national fabric even as Panama passed legislation comparable to the Chinese Exclusion Act that prevented this immigrant community from acquiring Panamanian citizenship until 1946.

The Chinese Panamanian community also patronized Carlos Endara Andrade, Panama’s most important fin-de-siecle photographer. An immigrant himself, Andrade served as Panama’s photographer of record. Through hundreds of studio portraits, he documented the social and political elites and the country’s changing demographics. Endara depicted first- and second-generation Chinese Panamanian businesses, families, and beauty queens through a highly dignified approach that portrays them as elegant, affluent, and modern. This presentation, based in part on my dissertation, examines Endara’s portraits of Chinese Panamanians through Ariella Azoulay’s ideas on the social contract of photography, arguing that this community used photography to claim visual and socio-political space within their new nation at a time when they faced legal discrimination.

Yechen Zhao, Assistant Curator of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago

Jarod Lew’s Mimicry and Racial Retouching in Photography

Mimicry is a multimedia installation by the Chinese American artist Jarod Lew (American, born 1987) that centers around a Kodak slide projector, which Lew has filled with color slides depicting the 1950s quotidian life of a white suburban family from the Midwest. In these, he meticulously collages over the faces of different family members with his own, each time attempting to match the expressions worn by the original subjects. Other slides in the carousel depict Asian American families from the same period, as well as unsettling images of a ‘Chinese Party’, a backyard celebration between white adults dressed in orientalizing costumes. Moving beyond discussions of ‘all look same’ and stereotyping representations of Asian Americans, this paper argues that the work foregrounds the specifically photographic labor of East Asian immigrants whom, as retouchers and studio assistants, have contributed to idealizing representations of America since the late nineteenth century. Lew learned photography while working for a family portrait studio; his subversive use of these techniques force viewers to confront the racialized dimension of this labor by scrutinizing these pictures for signs of tampering with the demographics of American vernacular photography.

Mia Liu, Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University

Chinese Pictorialism in Diaspora: Lang Jingshan’s Photography in the Americas

This paper examines the photo works by Chinese-Taiwanese photographer Lang Jingshan (郎靜山1895-1998) from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period of the artist’s intensive travels among the Chinese diasporic communities in the Americas. They are mostly landscape prints made with Lang’s signature style that emulates Chinese literate ink painting through techniques of “composite picture” (combination printing), and they also always include a miniscule figure, the cameo appearance of the famous ink painter Zhang Daqian (張大千1898-1985). Lang and Zhang remained close friends throughout the 20th Century, and both were exiles from their homes after 1949. While Lang was based in Taipei after 1950, Zhang relocated to the Americas, first to Argentina, then to Brazil, then moved to Carmel, California. These photo works commemorated Lang’s visits to Zhang, and his witness of Zhang’s series of relocations. Though appearing like Chinese literati ink paintings, they were in fact made of photo fragments taken in Brazil or California, carefully arranged, and manipulated by Lang in the darkroom so that the indexical markings of the American locations do not distract from the Chinese pictorialism effect that he was pursuing. However, these photos were much beyond aesthetic experiments or personal memories. I argue Lang’s photography offers creative modes and expressive forms to the Asian diasporic experiences. By uncovering and tracing these diasporic experiences represented in Lang’s seemingly aestheticist pictorial work, I argue Lang’s “composite picture” provided an important alternative to the cold war geopolitical impasses dictated by the world’s superpowers that diasporic communities must face. It stands for a cosmopolitan vision that intermediates the divides, seeks camaraderie, and forges new identities.

Pok Chi Lau

Since 1968, I have documented the migration of Cantonese people from China’s Pearl River Delta to Hong Kong and across the Americas. When I first arrived in Canada, working in a Chinese restaurant kitchen in 1970 exposed me to the Toishan dialect, which allowed me to connect deeply with migrant communities and gain access to their private worlds through photography.

Through the series of photographs I’ll present, I aim to shed light and increase understanding of the lived experiences of Cantonese migrants in key cities, including San Francisco, Pittsburgh, New York City, Kansas City, Vancouver and Halifax, Canada, Tijuana, Mexico, Panama City, and many cities and towns in Cuba. I trace their evolving identities and the common threads that connect them and their descendants.

From the 1930s to the 1980s, Cantonese migrants formed a large portion of the Chinese community in the Americas. Due to language barriers and cultural integration challenges, they were often confined to Chinatowns. While some eventually attained middle-class mobility through their children’s education, many remained in precarious working conditions. My work examines their economic struggles, spiritual beliefs, and cultural resilience in the Americas.

Through photography, I challenge the idealized portrayals of Asian diasporic communities, offering a counter-narrative that reflects their lived realities and transnational histories.

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

Drawing on the lived realities of Asian immigrant communities across America, To Majority Minority is a photography-based project that examines shifting demographics in the United States. By 2050, the populations currently labeled as minorities will become the majority. This work engages with that transformation by exploring assimilation, identity, and belonging among Asian immigrant families, including India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

The project collaborates with immigrant families to reclaim visual representation in response to rising anti-immigrant sentiments. By scanning archival family photographs and juxtaposing them with newly staged images of contemporary generations mimicking their ancestors’ poses, I create seamless photo animations that illustrate the passage of time and the evolving nature of identity. These ninety-second animations merge past and present, making visible the dis/continuity of cultural heritage amid pressures to assimilate. Embedded within the animations are textual narratives—firsthand accounts of their immigrant experience.

This presentation will showcase To Majority Minority, delving into its conceptual framework, artistic process, and collaborative methodology. As the demographic landscape of America shifts, the question of who gets to be seen as “American” remains contested. To Majority Minority offers a timely and innovative approach to positioning photography as a tool for resistance and reclamation.

Susan Sponsler-Carstarphen

Susan Sponsler-Carstarphen will present early and recent artwork which explores issues related to identity and being an Asian American international adoptee. Her work consists of photo-based artworks which include ceramics, cyanotype images on fabric, encaustic paintings, installation, mixed media images and quilts. Her work has been shown in Seoul, South Korea; Panama City, Panama; Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and Texas. Her work is included in numerous publications, most notably in the book Photography and Korea by Jeehey Kim and in “Convergent Conversations” by Margo Machida in Blackwell’s Journal: A companion to Asian art and architecture.

Brian Van Lau

After my father’s nearly decade long absence from my life, I was called and requested to be his caregiver amidst a sudden stroke and eventual brain cancer diagnosis. My father had escaped from Vietnam during the war, assimilated to Hawai’i, then returned back to Vietnam amidst his divorce from my mother, and began a new life, and a new family. During my last week with him, my father proposed to collaborate on a series of photographs to mend our fractured relationship. In the wake of his passing, the pictures we made became a new document of our relationship, combining uncovered letters about his criminal history, archival ephemera of my family’s experiences as first generation immigrants in Hawai’i, staged re-imaginings played by my Popo and Gung Gung, and documentary photographs set between Washington and Hawai’i to serve as allegorical backgrounds. We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys creates a cyclical and complicated portrait of my father as the central figure in an invert narrative paralleling the Prodigal’s Son contrasting the diasporic dreams of my Vietnamese family, with the omnipresent hypocrisy of its pursuit in the context of American assimilation.

In this presentation, I will go further into my father and I’s story, leading into an explanation of the methodologies and experience making and uncovering the work for it, piecing the fundamental and paradoxical arguments of what these found documents convey, and how the photograph can be used as a collaborative tool to mend generational trauma. We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys interrogates allegorical narrative, placing myself as the Prodigal son to – ironically – be searching for salvation, caught between familial obligation and personal forgiveness, with the object of the photograph serving as a tool of resolve, handling the evidence of a man looking to erase himself. This projects presents the document as a guiding character; criminal investigation, family history, and imagined memory overlapping.