(gentle music)
- I grew up in Memphis
and I lived in a neighborhood called White Haven
for most of my childhood.
I wasn't really allowed to leave the house,
so all I knew of Memphis was just, for the longest time,
just my front yard and the backyard.
One Halloween, we started to play this superhero game,
I think it was Batman.
Because we were just poor,
we were all wearing the same thing,
these black garbage bags,
and mostly having to rely on ourselves and our minds
and our imagination that if we say it,
that was enough for us.
There was this kind
of weird permission my family gave me.
It was, "It's okay to assimilate that,
if you need to learn English, that's great.
You don't have to hold onto the past
and maintaining speaking Chinese with us."
It was them letting me go.
The every day of, "Where are you from?
Where are you really from?
What's your Chinese name?
What's your Korean name?"
I'm not Korean.
"Where are you from?"
I was asked that constantly as a kid.
Some people joked that we chose Memphis
because of Elvis, or because of a similar climate.
Why my family ended up in Memphis is because of war,
because of military, because of domestic abuse.
My family started arriving in the 90s,
when Memphis started sponsoring Vietnamese refugees.
- Hi grandpa
- Hearing my grandmother just scream for no reason
in the middle of night because a firework got set off,
or the news of the Oklahoma city bombing
is something that is very familiar imagery for them.
It was just the ridiculousness
of how war really is not only embedded
in our land and borders, but in ourselves and the kids,
people that came after our parents.
How do we talk about it?
How do we live with it at the same time?
(gentle music continues)
I always returned to Memphis.
Memphis is just like that kind of nexus point
between mythology and history,
and sentimentality and memory.
And it's something to be misremembered in a way.
Much of my work and my family's history is just that,
it's bits and pieces.
It's a continuous sourcing of information and materials,
and anything that we can gleam of our past.
- Is it okay if we take your socks off?
- Take my socks off? Okay.
- Light looks good to me. I love it.
All right, I'm gonna just do a quick one right now.
I started to use cutouts of myself
and the ambivalence of what it is exactly
is kind of in between those categories,
where it is a prop, it is also an extension of me.
Can you turn your head slightly to your right?
Thank you. Three, two, one.
It is kind of a reflection of that fragmentation,
not of picking up bits and pieces of my family's histories,
but the materials that present themselves
and the connections that come through.
They are very improvised and come from my biography.
(upbeat music)
(indistinct chatter)
I started chasing Elvis tribute artists,
which is the politically correct term
for Elvis impersonators.
It's beyond this kind of impersonation and imitation,
it becomes transcendent.
I wanted to make a body of work
and I wanted to be capable of making a body of work
that was about representation,
that talked about pop culture
and the people's sense of the south
through these icons like Elvis.
And it has this kind of influence
in the way that the idea of Elvis,
the cut out of Elvis reverberates through my other projects.
(indistinct chatter)
(gentle music)
I think a lot about that photograph commemorating
the railroad and how they pushed a lot of laborers,
and especially the Chinese laborers, out of the picture.
And that kind of invisibility has reverberated
throughout photographic history.
How do we see ourselves when we are not represented?
I think it's a continuous performance as well
to constantly search for where do I stand in the picture?
What is the best way
to arrive at ourselves through photography?
(gentle music continues)