In This Silence We Encounter
Open Studio at Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Residency Program, Rochester, NY
March 6th, 2026
Cyanotype and inkjet on copy paper, 16mm film, and 35mm slides, dimensions variable
Bringing together text and reproduced historical images on cyanotypes, the series examines the coaching papers that circulated among Chinese immigrants during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Coaching papers recorded elaborate biographies to be memorized and internalized by prospective immigrants, often paper sons who purchased documents to assume fictive identities. Under the pressure of hostile interrogations, language became both an instrument of scrutiny and a means of survival.
Drawing on the relationship between moving images and their captions or subtitles, the work considers how text frames what an image makes visible—and what remains absent. Words are paired with images, displaced from their original contexts, and made to register what the historical record cannot hold. The distance between image and language opens a space for histories shaped by exclusion, concealment, and loss. Images remain silent. Words follow, attending to a silence that persists across generations.