Artist Statement
Raised by California’s never-ending heat fever and a Chinese immigrant family always reaching towards something glistening and unattainable, I lived my childhood to the beat of the gold rush. The crooning of Johnny Cash, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson—there was no life for me but the life of a cowboy. Decades later, even after the schooling, the heartbreaks, the move to the East coast, I still wear the boots, and that reckless thrum towards freedom still compels me to investigate why, and how, the carefully constructed image of the American west and the mythology of the cowboy has forged a historical narrative that “powerfully shapes who the citizenry is, where they dwell, what they remember, and what they forget” (Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts). My underlying research centers around how the fictional cowboy, a romantic emblem of American individualism, is one node in a mechanism of representation carefully crafted to obscure the genocidal history of westward expansion. I aim to understand the cowboy, and similar American cultural archetypes, as images that rewrite the past like a play—and as resources able to be imported and exported. In my work, cowboys dart around the canvas, faces obscured in shadow; silhouettes evading race, gender, and other anchored markers of identity.
