Between Contexts

"Between Contexts" considers the tension between how modern Asian Americans, Asians, and HAPAs self-identify and how they are viewed by others. Using incense and pyrography, I burn negative-space abstract characters into traditional Chinese paper. These character forms are based on real examples of cursive script Chinese calligraphy but are arranged in ways that eliminate the original meaning of the text they are taken from. Removing the characters from their original contexts, as well as from the paper itself, and placing them into a new "re-mixed" present, this series questions how inherited memories of a distant past, impact our individual paths to self-definition.