On the core of identification in the US is forgetting. The method of assimilation tells immigrants that the trail of least resistance is to easy their variations into imperial classifications.
“Like an invisible disease, assimilation is at its best when it is undetectable,” writes Anne Anlin Cheng in her current memoir Unusual Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Mannequin Minority (Random Home, 2024).
The sociologist Erving Goffman calls assimilation overlaying, the concept that you downplay or cowl over your variations to match mainstream tradition or expectation. Assimilation isn’t passing, it’s extra of a shell recreation. The great assimilationist, like the great woman, places on a great face, makes herself a bit of smaller for the convenience of others, does no matter is important to keep up the graceful floor of sociology. It’s not as a result of issues are simpler whenever you give in or just since you need to please, it’s as a result of what’s on the opposite facet of that civility is a violence so quotidian and profound that your very survival is at stake.
Element of Serena Chang’s “Conduit for Dreamt Waters” (2024) depicting the overlay of the artist’s father’s drawing on video footage of a Taiwanese manufacturing unit.
That concept of overlaying, and even uncovering, which might denote the other, is on the coronary heart of Serena Chang’s present exhibition, candy water, at Island Gallery, exploring her father’s reminiscences of working in a pantyhose manufacturing unit in Taiwan. His recollections of his youth on the island nation are rendered within the type of drawings of sugar cane and movies of a manufacturing unit, typically superimposed on each other. On the middle of this show is the exhibition’s namesake art work, a sugarcane ghost forest composed of 60 stalks that stretch sheer nude hosiery throughout plastic and metal rod armatures. The suggestion of a area evokes the reminiscence of a historic time and place, making a product that was as soon as ubiquitous for working ladies as a approach to conform to company requirements, encouraging them to cowl up for propriety’s sake.
Pantyhose are not required for many gown codes, notably in North America, as fashions for the fragile leggings have both been absolutely rejected or tastes have modified to include extra opaque supplies. On the base of every of those ghostly kinds are fragments from the Chinese language characters “you,” “me,” and “us.” The phrase for “us,” 我們, in pinyin is spelled Wǒmen, and that too is included, because the artist performs with language and its translation, one thing the undergirds assimilationist anxieties, as we frequently stroll a line that renders us, as immigrants, directly alien and/or acquainted.
Set up view of Serena Chang’s candy water exhibition at Island Gallery, with “Conduit for Dreamt Waters” (2024) on the precise.
Smaller objects displayed on the partitions embody packaging kinds coated densely with pictures of hosiery that rework them into a sort of camouflage, masking their utilitarian nature. Chang’s father’s drawing of a sugarcane forest turns the trace of a reminiscence into one more sample, and throughout we hear audio that implies an extra sort of sample recognition, as insect and manufacturing unit sounds mix. Aural overlaying is one more instance of conformity, as we conceal our linguistic rhythms and tones, in addition to our geographic journeys, to show to others we’re not like them, whoever they could be.
Listening to tales and making sense of fogeys’ reminiscences are obsessions of immigrant youngsters in settler colonial societies. Maybe this reminds us why we’re right here, what we misplaced to make the journey, how we slot in or don’t. Most of all, it anchors us in a society that does its utmost to overlook what got here earlier than. The grass is usually greener again there, and the water might be sweeter, too.
Serena Chang: candy water continues at Island Gallery (83 Bowery, Decrease East Aspect, Manhattan) via February 15. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.