Schneider Museum of Art
Rene Yung with "The Vanishing"
installation
Soap wall detail of "The Vanishing"
Soap detail
"The Vanishing" at the Schneider
Museum
The Vanishing (continued: Page 2)
Text from the catalog The Vanishing: Representing the Chinese in the American West
Installation by Rene Yung
Rather than strike a melancholy note of loss and abandonment, I want to comment on the communal amnesia both inside and outside communities throughout the course of history. …nges and Disappearances addresses the issue of memory for immigrants. Memory, whatever its specific content, is the only thing that an immigrant can bring with certainty to a new land. Memory continues to inform who the immigrant is even as s/he tries to adjust to the new environment, and yet with time, memory shifts and changes. The Chinese immigrants to the Wood River Valley were poorly understood even while they inhabited the area, and they were virtually forgotten after the end of their immediate usefulness to the region’s economy. What were the memories in their years away from their native land? This loss of personal memory parallels their erasure the communal memory.
In this installation, custom fabricated bars of soap imprinted with the word REMEMBER form a low wall adjacent to a wash tub filled with water. Viewers are asked to use the soap to wash washcloths imprinted in impermanent ink with words referring to people and things remembered, and to hang the washcloths on a clothesline. The cloths will be re-washed by subsequent viewers, and hung on the line again, in a continual cycle. With repeated use and washing, both the word REMEMBER on the soap and memory-words on the washcloths will fade, in a parallel process to the changes of individual and communal memory.
The spent soap will be displayed as part of the installation, on shelves on the walls. With each exhibition venue, the spent soap from previous exhibitions will be added to the installation, so that in time, the work is transformed from one featuring the wall of soap bars, to an accrual of soap remnants, and erased memories. Over the course of the exhibition, the installation will also embody the participation of viewers from the different communities the show will have traveled to. The viewers in fact become performers of the acts of erasure and of remembering, in analogous anonymity to that of the Wood River Valley Chinese immigrants.
The laundry activity of the installation references the laundry industry undertaken by many early Chinese immigrants as an ingenious solution to making a livelihood when faced with discrimination against owning land for farming and/or having significant mining stakes. The process of “cleaning” also comments on the perceived act of assimilation, whereby the immigrant is expected to shed old customs, and presumably, memories.
Chroniclers who appeared otherwise ignorant of the immigrants’ lives and the accurate rendition of their names, noted their diet, perhaps in an effort to grasp onto some tangible clues to a people that seemed incomprehensibly alien to them. Items of dried foodstuffs from Chinese immigrants’ staple diet, such as rice, dried shrimp and dried mushroom, are imbedded in some of the soap bars. Spices used in Chinese cooking, including five-spice powder, anise-seed, and ginger were also added to the soap.
The ghostly image of a 3-foot bowl of rice is projected onto a hovering scrim. In vernacular Chinese culture, the rice bowl is synonymous with livelihood, and it was in search of a better livelihood that the early—and most contemporary—immigrants came to the United States. That exigency is sometimes forgotten as subsequent generations of immigrants’ offspring adapt to American life.
Rene Yung, 2004
The Vanishing Page 1 The Vanishing Page 3 (Hung Liu)
The Vanishing Page 4 (More about Hung Liu) The Vanishing Page 5 (Peter Britt)
The Vanishing Page 6 (More about Peter Britt)
