In America, You Are Asked Why Are Leaves Green

A multi-media work comprised of a split-screen video and a live performance, embodying the paradoxical tensions central to my work as an immigrant artist: How can I authentically tell my stories to an inherently foreign audience, and must I be consumed by the American gaze? Interweaving footage filmed in factories in my mother's hometown in Jiangxi province with found footage from Silk Museums, clashing Chinese legends against its necessarily false English translation, I interrogate the Western viewer: how are you complicit in the orientalization of my homeland? But mostly, I ask myself, how is my lens inherently complicit and a part of this “othering” gaze?