Archive Fever

Work from Autopsies

46 × 24 inches
Archival inkjet prints, letterpress

Autopsies draws from a single 1870 photograph of Chinese boys trafficked from California to New England to serve as strikebreakers in a shoe factory. Departing from this image, Tsubota searches the archive for an imagined boy who could have—but never did—appear there, opening pathways into intertwined histories of race, photography, labor, and extraction. Using archival and original images, sculptural works, and fictional text, the project meditates on relationships between personal and collective histories, bodily and visual archives, and the unstable space between image and narrative.

Passages II

Single-channel video installation (color, sound); cast sugar cane sculptures
11:30 minutes

Passages II considers oceanic thinking as a connective force linking intertwined histories of exploitation and resistance across the Pacific and Caribbean. Combining digital and archival footage, cyanotypes on 16mm, and excerpts from Japanese, Caribbean, and Pacific literary traditions, the project reflects on the artist’s great-grandparents’ history as Japanese laborers on Hawaiian sugar plantations. The work situates these islands within broader imperial histories while highlighting their shared legacies of resistance and solidarity. Following Epeli Hauʻofa’s reframing of Oceania as “a sea of islands,” the piece envisions the ocean as a site of ancestral history, resilience, and futurity.

Look On the Bright Side

Single-channel video installation (color, sound)
16:30 minutes

Beginning in LED factories in southern China, Look On the Bright Side traces the geological timescales embedded in contemporary digital illumination. Interweaving factory footage with recycled social media videos, the film portrays communities shaped by—and suspended within—an environment of perpetual light. Its nonlinear narrative reveals networks of technological, industrial, and human bodies, exploring how fragile organic life persists amid a culture obsessed with brightness, transparency, and efficiency.

Untitled

T-shirts, hangers, cloth racks

Shanzhai Lyric is a research-based art project exploring the radical poetics of experimental English found on counterfeit (“shanzhai”) T-shirts. Through an expanding archive of “poetry-garments,” the project examines mistranslation, linguistic malfunction, and hybrid expression as forms of world-breaking and world-making that subvert global hierarchies. The work embraces nonsense, permutation, and technological aberration as speculative methods for imagining alternative linguistic and cultural futures.

Erasure Text Series

Inkjet print on rice paper
8.27 × 11.69 inches

This series transforms a 1910 London Magazine article titled Chinese in England, A Growing National Problem, one of the earliest portrayals of Liverpool’s Chinese community in popular media. By meticulously erasing explicitly racist descriptions and retaining fragmentary language, Yang assembles an alternative narrative that references the mass deportations of Chinese residents in the 1940s. The work intervenes in a discriminatory archive, reframing erasure as an act of reclamation.

Fair Use I

Inkjet print and acrylic on animation paper, 24 works
8.5 × 11 inches each

Fair Use investigates the political implications of copyright restrictions on archival images—particularly newsreel footage inaccessible to the very communities represented within them. Fair Use I reworks a 30-second newsreel about Lee Kyung Soo, a Korean War orphan adopted by a U.S. naval officer, using frame-by-frame erasure and rotoscoping. Kim employs fair use principles as transformative critique, questioning who owns historical images and who has the right to interpret them.

Waegwan from Above / Hill 303, 1954

wintergreen transfer and linoleum on paper
25 × 19 inches

Kang’s work emerges from a year-long engagement with her grandmother’s archive—poems, drawings, photographs, and recollections tied to the Korean War. Through reconstructed timelines and personal testimony, the artist weaves together histories of occupation, Western intervention, and intergenerational trauma. Waegwan’s hills, populated by “Korean ghosts, American ghosts,” become a site where memories collapse and converge. By tracing her Halmoni’s bittersweet accounts, Kang reflects on familial silence, national division, and the enduring specters of war.

Assembling Gender

Assembling Gender I:Maria’s Doll Kit (digital collage; framed)
Assembling Gender II:Maria’s Assembled Dolls (manual collage; framed)
Assembling Gender III:Eden’s Doll Kit (digital collage; framed)
Assembling Gender IV:Eden’s Assembled Dolls (manual collage; framed)

Assembling Gender consists of trans paper dolls constructed using images sourced from queer porn magazines (including On Our Backs, Taste of Latex, Bad Attitude), the Arizona Queer Archives, contemporary art periodicals, pop-internet culture, and the artists’ personal collections. Through digital and analog collage, the artists reanimate these cultural materials, forming new constellations of gender, embodiment, sexuality, and play. The resulting compositions speculate on yet-unimagined bodies and forms of gendered existence, treating the archive as a living site of possibility.

Another Dream

Archival Inkjet Print
Yozora (Starry Sky), 1988
9 × 11 inches

This work draws on Showa Sheet Glass—distinctive patterned glass widely used in postwar Japanese domestic architecture. Yu transfers these patterns onto tracing paper using cyanotype to build an archive of disappearing designs. Overlaid with mid-century family photos, the compositions evoke the view through patterned windows into intimate domestic scenes shaped by postwar ideologies of labor, reconstruction, and the “dream home.” Created during the 2024 Studio Kura residency, the work reflects on how material culture and memory intersect across generations.

exfoliation #1

Discarded ring binders, sheet protectors, plastic filing envelope, prong fasteners
10.5 × 11.5 × 11.5 inches

Drawing from their work as an archivist, Pan transforms containers and protective materials typically discarded during archival rehousing—binders, sheet protectors, folders—into a sculptural vessel. The work interrogates how the formal appearance of archives is constructed through the removal of “unstable” or “commonplace” materials. By hoarding these rejects and reassembling them into a new object, Pan reveals an archive born from archival ritual itself, asking what forms of knowledge and presence are erased through preservation.

Atmospheric Archive — degrees of transparency

Reclaimed window glass, atmospheric residue (iron oxide, silica, contaminants)
Dimensions variable

Developed in response to the former Sterling Steel Company site—now the National Building Arts Center—the work reflects on how industrial activity leaves material, ecological, and psychic residues. Window glass fragments stained with iron oxide and pollutants accumulate evidence of extraction, labor, and erasure. Without washing them, Smith reshapes and kiln-fires the shards, producing fused forms that function like litmus strips: recording atmospheric histories while transforming them. In dialogue with Derrida, the work examines the tension between preservation and erasure and the compulsion to save what is already vanishing.

Matrilineal Hair Archive

Interactive Installation; crowd-sourced human hair; LED panel; labels; containers; mixed media

Rooted in data feminism and speculative design, Matrilineal Hair Archive invites participants to contribute shed hair along with a trait they associate with their maternal line. These contributions form a living counter-archive of embodiment, memory, and care. Hair—carrying mitochondrial DNA and personal history—becomes material evidence of presence, labor, and lineage. Inspired by the artist’s memories of finding her mother’s hair throughout their home, the project reimagines archival practice as relational and affective, challenging institutional hierarchies that determine whose bodies and data are preserved.

We sit together, opening each to each

Unbound book: 46 pages; collage, oil transfer, painted elements
12 × 19.75 × 1.5 in

Borich’s project emerges from the Mary Wright Plummer Papers, engaging with how words become meaningful through relationships. By mining transcribed notes, poems, correspondence, and archival images, the artist reflects on how particular phrases resonate because of who shared them or held them close. The work proposes that the archive is not only a repository of documents but a network of interpersonal attachments that give language its emotional weight.

I heard…

Two-channel sound installation
30 minutes

I heard… layers a repeated spoken phrase—“I heard”—with a filtered PBS NewsHour broadcast reporting political crises, conflict, and global instability. Engaging Derrida’s concept of “archive fever,” the work treats sound as an unstable archive: fractured by static, distortion, and miscommunication. The installation highlights slippage between hearing and remembering, proposing that the archive is less a fixed record than a restless pulse shaped by absence, noise, and desire.

Special Materials（特殊材料制成的⼈）

Giclée prints; inkjet on transparency film; binder clips
Single-channel video, 3:00 minutes

The project takes its title from a Communist-era phrase celebrating self-sacrifice and ideological fulfillment. Peng visualizes an ongoing monologue between generations shaped by the Chinese Cultural Revolution, drawing from rehabilitated photographs and documents to reveal how historical narratives exert influence across time. The work reflects on the impossibility of reciprocal dialogue between past and present, creating an infinite “single-sided conversation” that exposes the continuity of ideological control across eras.