Messengers
Accent Sisters, New York, NY
January 8 to 15, 2026
In the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires, the widespread destruction of municipal birth records produced the conditions for what later came to be known as the “paper son” phenomenon. Large numbers of Chinese migrants entered the United States by purchasing or assuming false identities that claimed familial ties to U.S. citizens. In response, the federal government established the Angel Island Immigration Station in 1910 as a primary site for regulating and restricting immigration, particularly Chinese immigration. There, Chinese arrivals were subjected to prolonged, highly detailed, and adversarial interrogations designed to expose inconsistencies in their claimed identities. To pass these examinations, migrants carrying assumed identities were compelled to internalize meticulously constructed fictive biographies—lives composed in advance and memorized as if lived. Within Chinese migrant networks, coaching books became essential tools for survival within this exclusionary immigration regime.
The exhibition unfolds around a 16mm film projection installation alongside a series of images. The film imagines the moment when coaching books inscribed with false identities and invented lives are passed into the hands of Chinese immigrants facing interrogation. Drawing inspiration from Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of “minor histories,” Messengers considers how history might be retold in ways that unsettle official narratives and systemic violence. Through a reexamination of “paper son” histories from the era of Chinese Exclusion, immigration interrogation archives, and historical imagery, Zhao Yanbin’s moving-image, photographic, and installation-based practice attends to the mutability of identity, the visibility and invisibility of historical experience, the politics of affect, and the urgent significance of reclaiming the power to narrate.
Project Technical Support:
Mono No Aware
Performance:
Ce Zhang, Kevin Le
Gratitude:
Kenix Liang, Steve Cossman, Matthew McWilliams, Mono No Aware, Ce Zhang, Kevin Le, Yuhan Shen, Qiuyu Wu, Alison Long, Jiaoyang Li
Messengers: Mono No Aware Open Air Series
March 27, 2026