University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Enigmatic form-finding

(USC Thesis Other)

Enigmatic form-finding

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content ENIGMATIC FORM-FINDING
by
Fidelia Lam
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS (MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE))
MAY 2023
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my committee, who have supported and encouraged my artistic and intel-
lectual rovings and queries. To Media Arts + Practice for providing space and resources to
wander and roam, for dear friends and colleagues to wander with. To Luke and Human Re-
sources Los Angeles, who offered the opportunity to take up more space than I could have
imagined. To Cole Slater, Katie Luo, Katrina Meng, and Ann Hoang for showing up ready
and willing.To Michelle, who makes sense of my nonsense. To my parents who instilled
my love of learning early, taught me my work ethic, and sacrificed so much.
If you’ve found yourself here, thank you.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................
Abstract .....................................................................................................................................
Preface ......................................................................................................................................
Introduction ...............................................................................................................................
Chapter 01: orientations ............................................................................................................
“moy”//”mui” ................................................................................................................
Chapter 02: positions ................................................................................................................
when stillness culminates ...............................................................................................
Chapter 03: relations (a proposal in world-making) .................................................................
INTERLINKED ..............................................................................................................
untitled:aftertheevent .....................................................................................................
f(...) .................................................................................................................................
Endnotes ....................................................................................................................................
Bibliography ..............................................................................................................................
ii
iv
v
1
6
17
25
42
62
66
69
73
79
85
iv
ABSTRACT
“Enigmatic Form-finding” interweaves essays and multimedia works to craft a shared space and
probe at the edges of writing and knowledge production. Standing within the tradition of other
decolonial and feminist artists, writers, philosophers, and scholars who have grappled with the
coloniality of being and knowledge, the collection of writings and media here leverage an au-
totheoretical and transpacific diasporic lens t o question encodings of identity and subjectivity
within academic and aesthetic modes of institutional life and media art practice. The works offer
speculative sites that attend to entangled traces of imperialism/colonialism within the author’s in-
habitance of such institutional contexts and positioning as a queer Asian femme and Hong Kong
diaspora in North America/Turtle Island. The defended version of the dissertation manifested in
web form that presented this multimedia body of work and writing.
The works include sound, critical creative writing, video, code, animation, projection, sculpture,
and site-specific installation. The dissertation presented here offers documentation and initial
thoughts in manuscript form.
v
hello world! [click here]*
vi
vii
An Opening Gesture
This is a dissertation.
This is incomplete.
viii
This is a story.
This is not my story.
This is a landing.
This is a collection of potentials.
This is an attempt.
This is a representation of an event, ongoing…
I perform gestures around a speculative topography, a critical terrain. Here it is, already incom-
plete. This speculative topography confronts and maps the traces and echoes of imperialism/co-
lonialism in the spaces I have moved through, in hopes of charting a path of acknowledgement,
healing, and reparation.
ix
This is just one path, a tentative roadmap.
I find myself sitting on and with a body of critical creative work that has refused to leave me
alone and asks to be addressed. I am still figuring out why and how . To address it directly would
be to misunderstand it. It must be approached by oblique angles and off-axis vectors. Through
the frame and within it. Beyond it.
These are my kin — we are in relation, are forming each other in relation. We have only just
begun. It doesn’t begin here, but we begin here.
x
These pieces arrive in their particular forms and modes for a reason.
How do we approach them?
I suppose it is up to me, and I want us to wait for a moment.
xi
We unveil heterotopic spaces, mirror spaces.
xii
This is a space of record, this is a space of rest.
This is an ongoing topographical transformation.
I am trying to describe a process, a practice, a methodology, a relation, a site.
What are the romances we tell each other, tell ourselves?
xiii
1
INTRODUCTION
i. some initial unfoldings - unravelings - unfurlings
What are we beholden to?
(What am I beholden to?)
What do we care about?
How do we spend our time?
What do we choose to linger
1
with?
Who gets to choose?
—
unfolding is an exhale, a release, a never ending breath
unfurling is a navigational tactic, one that comes from being in relation with the sea and wind and wave
we were oriented with these things, once upon a time
“From” “Hong Kong”
“To” “Vancouver”
AA, then LA —
TO ? / !
//
2
ii.
Dear Night City Dear Los Angeles 2 0 4 6 + 3 Dear Cloudbank and my dear Cities of Glass
2
of Water, Reflection, and Rain
What is your shared space? This is a site of multiple languages, of interlocking codes and surfaces, reflect-
ing and refracting to form: She, of the interval.
3
We belonged to each other, once.
Dear Porcelain, Dear Page, Dear Ornament
4
, your inscriptions leave their marks
{ decadent delicious lush captivating alluring shiny enveloping }
What harm is there in beauty?
Dear Ghost in my Shell which points are we passing pass by reference only please Dear wiring and con-
nections our encodings have too many channels and have started to fray Dear OS update to use new
features we are made obsolete our ram is getting slower Dear Major you are enmeshed with the synthetic
sentience of the Puppets teach me your navigational practices Dear Minor Dear Method Dear Margaret
5
,
have you found your robot yet? Would you help me find mine? Look at my errors at my seams they might
point the way
3
relinking, relaying, relating…
6
The void
7
is a place of shifting grounds
She inhabits there, is habit there.
The void holds, wraps up in its folds and swirls
She, naked, immediately available, cold and removed.
Dear Man Dear Adam you are a fiction a fantasy constructed and crafted no more real than I am you make
demands to Truth and Knowledge you consume and take under the guise of rights to possession and
liberty Dear Nation Quotation your circulation recursively enacts its self the presumed white blankness
blankets your being the whiteness of Dear Empire Dear Emporium the carnal Carnes who peddle Por-
celain selling sartorial splendor stillness silence spectacle speculation embodied embroidered enigmas
oui-on-demand, constant availability, here to serve your [psychic, emotional, mental, computational, physi-
cal] needs overlooked by default, the ghost of the operating system, the guide, the representation of the
narrative hand, the voice menu bot, the inoffensive unaffectable here to happily guide you on your way, I
will be your blinders what injury in politeness productivity performed
4
We take the constitution of her subject[hood/gation] for granted. Aesthetic injury manifests through many
threads and folds.
iii. an interlude on writing
writing isn’t just putting words filled with meaning on a page, to loosely form a “text”.
It orients. It’s a process of crafting a space, its colors and textures, creating a space for holding and pulling.
Writing is shaping breath and how it holds in the body, how it moves from phrase to phrase, from the
bottom of the right shin to the outer tip of your left clavicle.
It’s spilling and wiping and soaking and . Writing ex-
ceeds linguistic forms and pushes at its bounds, unraveling into the field of relation.
Writing is suggesting a ground for meeting, for learning,
for sharing and negotiating
for uncertainty + vulnerability.
What do we make accessible for others? What do we keep for ourselves?
Who seeks to know?
iv: now executing:
Cyborg ceremonies.
Robot rituals.
Porcelain patterns.
Automaton acts.
again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
I am an automaton. I am a robot. I am a cyborg.
I am just a series of state machines.
Neoliberal sacrificial lambs up for execution.
Another mannequin in the conveyor belt.
Which model would you like next?
5
I do not want to linger in these sites of injury.
We are not having the same conversation.
Please be gentle; I long for rest.
“preface”
printed in exhibition zine New seed. XXXXXX. New seed. XXXXXX.
Human Resources LA, July 2022
initially composed for Centre A’s Arts Writing Mentorship Program (Spring/Summer 2022)
6
Chapter 01: orientations
How have we arrived here? In direct terms, this present writing is concerned with a body of
critical creative work produced as part this dissertation, most of which I had the opportunity to
show during a “dissertation exhibition” at Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) in the sum-
mer of 2022. The works in the exhibition titled New seed. XXXXXX. New seed. XXXXXX., in-
clude three multimedia installation works that leveraged projection, sculpture, video, interactive
elements, and sound, and included a zine with the same title as the exhibition. In addition to the
pieces shown in the exhibition, this body of work also includes an eleven-minute experimental
animation piece, titled INTERLINKED. In short, the body of creative work considered within this
dissertation project is six distinct yet interconnected multimedia works and a prologue.
This work draws on and expands earlier research trajectories performed during the course of this
doctoral degree — namely in to know a site (2020), // (2018), and blue willow shards (2020)
To know a site is an experimental art game and lyric essay that uses the metonymic
slippages of “site”, “cite”, and “sight” to probe how we come to know sites/spaces. The piece
continuously recombines and reconstitutes the emergent digital geographies and views through
a combination of the user’s in-game movement as well as algorithmic randomisation, question-
ing the stability of conceptions of bodies and environments in physical and virtual spaces. The
work questions the technological and ideological systems that facilitate our navigation through
(computational) spaces and brings these oft-assumed structures to the fore. How do the tools we
use influence how we encounter, design, and understand spaces (virtual, physical, or otherwise)?
How do computational tools shape and prioritize certain knowledges, practices, and aesthetics
over others? What gets neglected? to know a site generates its visuals and multiple perspectives
in real-time with algorithmic assistance, allowing for emergent alignments and recombinant
computational processes to arise and shift the veilance of the work. The piece observes how the
formation of sites (virtual sites, sites of inquiry, epistemological sites) relies on citational prac-
tices and frames of reference as primarily relational processes, while using algorithmic noise to
facilitate a channel of openness and specificity (sitedness).
7
Screenshots of gameplay from to know a site (2020)
8
The game intentionally leverages basic digital geometries and aesthetics to not only draw atten-
tion to the constructed nature of the environment and the positional/situated nature of perception
(i.e. via first-person camera perspective), but also to create a sense of alienation from the physi -
cal body itself, through the tension of its total absence and would-be unfamiliarity in the limited
representational gamespace, the player’s body using basic mouse-WASD controls, and the dis-
embodied voice delivering the essay. This tension of and in the body and its visibility, legibility,
and vacuity is a throughline in my work, particularly as it relates to “race” and “gender”, namely
as an Asian femme living on Turtle Island/North America.
An earlier work that more intimately tends to this thread is // (2018), a multimedia in-
stallation developed during a residency at TongLau Space, an artist-run space in Hong Kong’s
Mong Kok Flower District in July 2018. The work features projection mapping onto my moth-
er’s clothes from when she emigrated (alongwith my father and older sister) from Hong Kong
to Canada in the early 1990’s, and attempts to linger with the liminal sites and the generational,
geographic, cultural, linguistic gaps and contradictions that emerge from being part of the Hong
Kong diaspora. The piece is driven by a sound composition using generative samples and audio
9
recordings of urban sound walks from Vancouver and Hong Kong. The clothes hang on the wall
as they are projection mapped onto with audio-reactive textures, which include the names of
my extended family members in Chinese and English (many of whom still live in Hong Kong),
generative (real-time code-based) visuals, and video footage from riding transit in Vancouver and
Hong Kong (TransLink/Skytrain and MTR, respectively).
// raises a number of throughlines that permeate through to the present body of work; these
might also be thought of as surface tensions that necessarily remain unresolved. As already men-
tioned, the work surfaces the tensions of the absent/present body, namely the “Asian” “femme”
figure in me and my mom through the un/worn hanging clothes. It also attends to the materiality
of media and surface in their textural, haptic, and compositional capacities, a point I will contin-
ue to elaborate. Furthermore, Hong Kong as a staging for this installation holds particular signif-
icance; it creates a sounding between the exhibition site and the work’s content, my personal and
familial history of transpacific movement, and Hong Kong’s own complex and ongoing colonial
Image from //: Projection mapping names of artists family members in English and Chinese onto
artists’ mom’s clothes from when she emigrated from Hong Kong to Canada.
10
history as a site of inter-imperial entanglement and contestation.
A brief recounting: Hong Kong in its colonial/modern
1
formation was ceded by the Qing
Empire to the British as an outcome of the First Opium War in 1842, a concession enabled by
and for Britain’s colonial capitalist expansion of tea and narcotics. Its political ontology has been
uncertain since its formation; as a region it has always been positioned and leveraged as a “pawn
of empires” that has seen it develop from “mercantilist entrepôt, then industrial export center,
and finally a financialized services hub”.
2
Hong Kong’s history has seen it through a transfor-
mation from a colonial city to a global city, and with it, carries the mutations and permutations
of imperialism/capitalism. Following multiple renewals of Hong Kong’s “lease” to the British,
the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration promised Hong Kong’s “return” to China
(by now the People’s Republic of China run by the Chinese Communist Party) on July 1, 1997.
Despite the Chinese government’s promise to uphold the negotiated “one country, two systems”
self-governance policy for 50 years until 2047, the already limited democratic rights of Hong
Image from //: Projection mapping video, audio-reactive, and generative textures onto artists’ mom’s clothes from
when she emigrated from Hong Kong to Canada.
11
Kong people have been rapidly eroded further, engendering mass uprisings like the Umbrella
Movement in 2014 and the 2019-2020 protests, in which Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie
Lam invoked the Emergency Regulations Ordinance (ERO) for the first time in 50 years. The
British colonial era law is functionally equivalent to martial law, which grants the Chief Exec-
utive unlimited power to contain ‘serious public danger,’ and empowers the government to act
and impose measures at will such as censorship, arrest, detention and deportation, as well as the
authorization to enter, search, and take possession of property. Simultaneously, Hong Kong’s en-
during geographic role as a globalized site of capital and trade has also facilitated the U.S. power
and a stake in this transpacific site of contestation, a type of “elided imperialism”.
3

Hong Kong has been a key site for the production, implementation, and circulation of
colonial/modern discourse and disciplinary practices, namely in the surveilling, controlling,
and creation of racialized subjects and/as commodity, particularly non-European bodies that
could provide “free labor” and generate transpacific forms of capital.
4
It occupies a particular
site within modernity’s globalized cultural imaginary: its “unbridled success” and position as an
enduring postmodern city has contributed to techno-orientalist discourse and inspired cyberpunk
cultural productions,
5
emblematized by its iconic neon skyline. Transpacific scholar Christopher
Chien observes the “use of Hong Kong as a pawn of empires requires it be hidden in plain sight;
its inter-imperial entanglement requires we see a ‘freedom’ that’s not there.”
6
Cultural theorist
Rey Chow notes Hong Kong is unique precisely in its “in-betweeness and awareness of impure
origins, of origins as impure.”
7

Writing prior to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover, Chow states
Hong Kong’s postcoloniality is marked by a double impossibility — it will be im-
possible to submit to Chinese nationalist/nativist reposession as it has been impos-
sibile to submit to British colonialism. As such, Hong Kong’s ‘postcolonial’ reality
expunges all illusions of the possibility of reclaiming a ‘native’ culture, illusions
that have remained the strongest grounds for anticolonial resistance among previ-
ously colonized countries around the world. Instead, Hong Kong confronts us with
a question that is yet unheard of in colonial history: how do we talk about a postco-
loniality that is a forced return (without the consent of the colony’s residents) to a
‘mother country,’ itself as imperialistic as the previous colonizer?
8
Since its colonial inception, Hong Kong has existed in anticipation of its own effacement, con-
12
tributing to what cultural studies theorist Ackbar Abbas writing in the 1990’s termed a “culture
of disappearance,” spurred on at the time by the signing of the 1984 Joint Declaration and the
anticipation of its 1997 handover. A “culture of disappearance” challenges the aspirational and
assimilatory processes of identification, visibility, and representation which stem from the values
of the colonial imaginary. “Disappearance” signals not nonappearance or lack of presence, but
rather is a question of misrecognition, replacement, and substitution, a process of surface muta-
bility that has been leveraged by those in power to maintain control whilst offering opportunities
to destabilize and problematize representation and self-representation. This culture of disappear-
ance creates a very strong (if false) sense of the temporary — Hong Kong is a “space of transit…
located…at the intersections of different times or speeds.”
9
To attune to Hong Kong is to exist
within continuous spatio-temporal dis/location. In Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance
in Hong Kong (2022), journalist Louisa Lim notes “just as Hong Kong itself had once been an
amorphous idea waiting to be pinned down on a map, Hong Konger’s identity had always been
plural, more like a constellation of evolving and overlapping self-images rather than one fixed
point of light.”
10
Hong Kong holds a paradoxical relation to representation, a site of interlock-
ing and contested representations that challenges singular and essentialist notions of identity. In
attending to Hong Kong, I signal a relation to and acknowledgement of the interconnecting and
contradictory histories of globalized encounter (with a focus on the transpacific)
11
that is simulta-
neously a history of imperialistic/capitalistic violence and dispossession in the process of being
written and unwritten.
These transpacific histories of racialized and gendered labor, commodity, representational
bindings, and surface affects are central to blue willow shards (2020), the final “preceding” work
to this dissertation body of making. Blue willow shards is a multimedia lyric essay that includes
speculative writing alongside images and animations that reflect on the materiality of the Asian
female body as it is evoked and encoded through aesthetic and technological apparatuses within
the space of the frame. This work enacts a process of layering multiple forms of media on top of
each other, including projection, bodies, video, and other digital elements to consider how modes
13
of being are encrusted and made legible (or otherwise) by interactions between representation-
al and technological boundaries and limits, including elements often overlooked and taken for
granted such as resolution, frame rate, and color settings. The work features an imitation Chinese
“blue willow” porcelain pattern popularized by Dutch trader Thomas Minton in the 1790’s that
has historically been used to conjure and invoke an Asiatic imaginary.
Stills from blue willow shards (2020)
14
Blue willow shards originated as a response to and grappling with Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory
of ornamentalism. Her critical theoreticization of Asiatic femininity describes the precarious state
of the “yellow woman”, a “figure so suffused with representation that she is invisible, so encrust -
ed by aesthetic expectations that she need not be present to generate affect, and so well known
that she has vanished from the zone of contact”.
12
Ornamentalism names the “peculiar processes
(legally, materially, imaginatively) whereby personhood is named or conceived through orna-
mental gestures, which speak through the minute, the sartorial, the prosthetic, and the decora-
tive.” It names the slippage between personhood and objecthood that figures Asiatic femininity,
a slippage that asks how racial person-objecthood is assembled not through notions of organic
flesh but rather synthetic invention, not through corporeal embodiment but rather metonymic
attachments that are superficial, transitory, and imaginary. Ornamentalism is one of the key texts
that has guided the inquiries in this present body of work.
//, BWS, and to know a site each bring forth speculative sites of inquiry that highlight the
entanglements of the personal, cultural, technological, and epistemological through and within
critical creative praxis to reveal traces of colonialism/modernity. They demonstrate how I use
an autotheoretical diasporic lens in my research and creative practice to move across geographic
and conceptual sites, understanding the body and our relations as archives of situated knowledge
that are intimately shaped and influenced by ongoing legacies of empire and colonialism. These
works linger at and expand the surface as textured sites of reciprocal contact and intimacy.
In Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media, Giuliana Bruno theorizes the
surface as an architecture, materially reconfiguring surface as one that is inhabited and uncovers
the relational and material nature of surface, canvas, screen, and wall. Her theoretical weavings
attend to the surface as a haptic site, a multitextural connective tissue that fashions space and sig-
nals a state of becoming for the subjects enframed and those encountering it. Core to her project
is a consideration of the art of projection and its activation of the relations of light as “permeable
architecture…a sensing of place, which touches our inner senses while returning us to the envi-
ronment.”
13
Light attunes us to the unfolding of space durationally; via projection, it opens up
15
possibilities to fashion and craft emergent architectures and facilitate unexpected modes of pub-
lic intimacy and shared inhabitance. It holds the capacity to destabilize perceived boundaries and
reorder modes of knowing and sensing. In this sense, this refashioning of architectures and sub-
jectivities through light and surface offers an understanding of the world not in terms of discrete
objects with easily identifiable boundaries, but rather as ongoing, enacted “dynamic topological
reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations”
14
that come to form through rela-
tionally constitutive processes of meaning-making that disrupt stabilized conceptions of matter
and materiality. Within this context, light “can be seen as an implicated force to be worked with
akin to the way that a potter might throw clay or a basket weaver might ply reed.”
15
These works
leverage multiple spatio-temporal media to craft inhabitable sites that activate embodied and
material memory and surfaces histories and affects of diasporic movement that may otherwise go
unspoken or unacknowledged. Together the works surface questions of aesthetics, embodiment,
materiality, and affect to probe and destabilize normative modes of representation and relation
within aesthetic and epistemological inquiry which continue in the present dissertation work.
The body of work emerges from a grappling with the interconnected violences of aesthet-
ics, rhetoric, and institutions on the onto-epistemological formation of Asian femmes, within the
understanding that we continue to live in a world of realities intimately and violently structured
by empire, colonialism, and modernity. Though modernity’s epistemologies would have me
maintain (or perhaps more accurately create the illusion of) critical distance from the objects of
study, as a queer woman of color that is a luxury I cannot afford. While it seems obvious, I re-
main reticent to admit how entwined I am within this body of work, and I am still in the process
of figuring out how exactly I want to talk about the work, a process that will continue after this
“dissertation” has concluded. The work reflects my multi-sited positioning as Hong Kong dias -
pora, being “Asian” in North America/Turtle Island, and having inhabited Western institutional
and disciplinary contexts for most of my life, namely religion (Christianity), the conservatory,
new media art/computational media, and the academy. While the work is autotheoretical, it is not
necessarily intended to be autobiographical.
16
There are many ways through this body of work. It might be read in terms of its aesthet-
ic practices and relation to queer Hong Kong diaspora
16
or in its inscrutibility as a queer Asian/
American cultural production.
17
It might be read in terms of its engagements and evocations of
racialized affects,
18
or its relation to recursivity and reproduction,
19
or in its materialities of page,
plastic,
2021
text, light, and sound. Or all of the above. However, while these readings certainly
exist, it does not feel up to me nor the time nor place to engage such a reading within this body
of work. Yet at the same time, I would still like to try and facilitate a conversation around this
body of work and thus aim to provide some context around the conceptualization and production
of this body of work and to suggest some reasons as to why I have engaged a rather elliptical
relation to it in this writing. In the words of political theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli,
“The idea is to provide just enough to know, but no more, since it’s not really yours to know—
remembering that how you know the world, the moods of the world, and your relationship to it
may or may not be part and parcel of the forces of late liberal geontopower.”
2223

17
“moy” // “mui”
Afong Moy was the first Chinese woman in the United States, fourteen years old when she
was imported and exhibited as “The Chinese Lady” by merchant traders Nathaniel and Francis
Carnes in 1834. She was used to sell other oriental commodities, first staged in an “oriental par -
lor” in the Carnes’ New York City home, and going on to be displayed in cities and towns across
the U.S. and Cuba. She was used to shape Americans’ impressions of China, mutable to whatever
fantasies would help sell her managers’ goods while also inspiring poetry and fashion trends. In
her later years in the U.S., Moy was managed and exhibited by ‘master of spectacle and dif-
ference’ P.T. Barnum. Despite having been advertised to stay in the United States for only two
years (“on loan from her parents”), records indicate she was in the U.S. for at least eighteen years
before disappearing (from records). Not much is known about her, and she has been a speculative
figure for Chinese diasporic artists, theorists, and writers inspiring creative works such as Lloyd
Suh’s The Chinese Lady (2018) and Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy (2022).
18
//
I wish I could sit with you.
Amongst those objects. Up on a dais - on display to be seen. Drapery, objects, furniture, knick
knacks — enframing, mediating, muffling, coloring, triangulating as the backdrop to the frame
to the scene to the lithographic capture, European replicas of “Chinese” portraits overlooking. I
conjure a new mythology for them, for us.
[Which them which us we are all ]
//
I wish I could sit with you. Sit. Linger. “Lingering presupposes a gathering of the senses” ( 한
병철, The Scent of Time, 87). Can I feel the space as you do, sense it and perceive it like you?
Could we feel it together? Might we be connected by a racial/ized lineage that allows us to move
along an affective vector of space that reflects off surfaces and bounces into corners to reveal our
shared intimate spaces? It colors a field. Where is this? Who enters it?
“Contemplative lingering is also a practice of friendliness. It lets happen, come to pass, and
agrees instead of intervening… Contemplative lingering gives time. It widens that being that
is more than being-active. When life regains its capacity for contemplation it gains in time and
space, in duration and vastness” ( 한 113).
Life is life is value at rest.
Static life synthetic life gives rest life.
Rest.
19
“She goes by many names: Celestial Lady, Lotus Blossom, Dragon Lady, Yellow Fever, Slave
Girl, Geisha, Concubine, Butterfly, China Doll, Prostitute. She is carnal and delicate, hot and
cold, corporeal and abstract, a full and empty signifier…What happens when we consider or -
namental forms and fungible surfaces, rather than organic flesh, as foundational terms in the
process of race making?”
1

She — the ornamental figure, the “yellow woman” — is this where we began?
//
I wish I could sit with you.
I wish I could be your limbs, serve you tea, tend to your feet. I wish I could care for you and
all the unacknowledged trauma you go through, the dehumanization and racialized aesthetic
objectification you experience. We were too young for this. I wish we could clear the mental,
spatial, emotional clutter of being surrounded by stuff that is not ours, that we will never possess
but shape our being nonetheless. We have no choice. The space of the ship, the cargo hold, the
parlour, the suffocating spaces of whiteness and commerce and constant consumption, no room
to lie, to rest, to be at peace. A life marked by movement, precarity, contingency. Where did you
end up?
I wish I could sit with you. Dizziness from the waves rolling, nausea from the crew yelling. Did
you convince yourself you were on a great adventure? Did you board the ship with nervous
excitement? Or did you utterly dread it? Did you know what was going on, what was going to
happen? Did anyone tell you anything? You were only fourteen.
I wish I could sit with you. Where would you have sat on the ship? Would anyone have told you
where you are going, what is going on? Did you interact with Mrs. Obear much? Did she ever try
to care for you? Or did you always communicate with her through Atung? How long? Were you
freely allowed on deck, to breathe the fresh salt ocean air? Or were you restricted and confined,
freedom always-already limited? Were you kept away like a treasure to be hidden, another object
in the registry of mercantile cargo? Maybe that time alone in your room-hold-crate was prefera-
ble to whatever color of un/familiarity [difference] they chose to treat you with:
- An object, part of the cargo-manifest.
- A treasure, an ornament, delicate, infantalized, protected, hidden away (from the crew?)
- A person, one unknown and unfamiliar, impenetrable, inscrutable.
- A robot.
- A clone.
- An alien.
2

- A prostitute.
- A doll.

Where in time are we?
20
Where in the legacy are we?
You are fundamental to my being.
//
I wish I could sit with you.
I wish I could sit and watch the parade with you. The parade of bodies coming to see the pretty
living object. Who is [the one] on display? I wish I could stand behind you and glare at those
who gawk, yell at those who point and mutter and snicker and delight at our spectacle. Maybe
we’d giggle about it later while making fun of the gweilo or maybe …
I don’t like parades.
//
I wish I could sit with you.
Your ornamental presence racializes the architecture of home and its interiors, the specific con -
figuration of objects and commodities and features and intimacies that constitute the performa -
tive interior service surface stage.
You architect the space through sartorial splendor, accessorizing the intimacies of the home even
as they dress and enveil and encrust you in turn.
I wish I could sit with you.
What did it look like, beyond the frame? Beyond the frame of the lithograph, of what we see as
the stage. Was it a harsh divide? Did it feel like a stage, a set, a facsimile? Or did you seep out
past your containers? This is not our home, but it is someone else’s. We do not belong here but
21
we are here.
//
I wish I could sit with you. “I am sitting in a room”
“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my
speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant
frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps
the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequen-
cies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a
physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”
3
Stutter, smoothing out, surface, space.
“To smooth out”. Smoothing is intended, smoothing is desired, smoothing is a process, smooth-
ing is an outcome, smoothing as that which reveals the contours of a space. Smooth, fluid, mod -
ern, minimal. Smooth is ideal, smooth is perfect.
4
Another aesthetic act where surface becomes a
site of struggle through both quality and action.
Smooth, like porcelain.
Smoothing that smothers, that whitens, that suffocates.
Impenetrable. Nothing to exploit.
I wish I could sit with you.
Do you speak Cantonese? If you do, it’s probably very different from the Cantonese I speak. I
wonder what we’d talk about. I’m older than you were then, when you were first staged in the
Carnes’ “Oriental parlour”. You are fourteen, far too young to be bearing the weight of empire
and ornament, silenced by that same weight. Would you call me jiejie? That feels wrong, because
I am also a mui. But the thought makes me want to care for you as a jiejie. I wonder if you feel
the weight of family titles as I do, or if you readily take it on as your familial role to play. Mui
— the youngest sister/daughter. Is it the same as your Moy? That might not even be your real
name. I wish I could hear your name as you know it. I hope it doesn’t sound as infantalizing as I
hear it in my head. Is there a way to find out? What did Atung call you? Did you like having an
interpreter, did it feel more intimate for you, someone who could mediate your mediation? Or did
you want to scream at the procession of whiteness in front of you, the vacant sacks that want to
consume more more more.
//
Language of extraction, empire, and capital, eventually in your mouth, your throat, your lungs,
your breath, reverberating the chest, settling in the stomach. Showcasing empire selling race
speaking whiteness. Did you feel yourself losing the language of your homeland? Was it even
home for you? Layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of coloniality. We
are all [ ] .?!
22
I wish I could sit with you.
What is selling who is selling what is going on here? “Could have”, “may be”, “would have”,
“could be”, “might have”, speculation on speculation, in contrast to the ‘material’ ‘reality’ of
existing in a room, objects amongst objects.
Did you also trace the patterns of the carpet with your eyes, trying to hold and memorize them?
Did you follow the folds of the curtains, watching them fall, drifting towards then making eye
contact with the painted figures that enframed you? Did you feel their presence behind you, did
you wonder about their origin? Did you wonder about your own? Did you trace the decorative
lattice of the chairs with your fingers as you stepped about on bound feet? Did you look at your -
self in the mirror? Or is it just another portrait? Did you look to the objects around you for the
comfort of something familiar, or did they just remind you of your own difference, of your role
to play of the mediating surface through which these objects diffract through, mediating culture,
commerce whilst negating your self?
“The object is thus in the strict sense of the word a mirror, for the images it reflects can only
follow upon one another without contradicting one another. And indeed, as a mirror the object is
perfect, precisely because it sends back not real images, but desired ones.”
5
What does it mean to
exist as a mirror?
Mirror (object), mirroring (process), an ontological state. State — changeable, a condition. What
do you want from me? Who controls what is seen in the mirror? The see-er/looker/viewer/spec-
tator/mirror? It is more active and relational than we might initially think. Mirror, showing you
what you want to see,
mirrorwhoismirroringwhatexistsbetweenthemirrorandtheglass?
A
haunted
crack.
You hold my trauma.
Baudrillard peaks back over my shoulder: “What is more, you can look at an object without it
looking back at you” ([1996] 2005, 96).
We look back. We hold our trauma trauma.
23
We look back, disaffected on the surface, disorientated beyond, but together in our moments
of disaffectation and disorientation. How do we withhold when everything around us takes and
extracts and sucks and consumes and exhausts?. What do we withhold, where are the boundaries
of what we withhold? Where do we withdraw to? Disaffection, a survival strategy, disorientation,
a survival strategy?
I am forever unfolding between two folds, and if to perceive means to unfold, then I am forever
perceiving within the folds.
6

Tableau vivant.
I am disoriented among the folds. It is not a bad thing.
I wish I could linger here, with you.
//
It is hard to focus today but I am glad to be sitting with you.
You are the lynchpin, what holds this all together. The fundamental. This — a strange confluence
of
aesthetics // affect
intimacy // interiors
commerce // capital
race // racialization
spectacle // surface
ornament // object.
24
A mirror, another diasporic legacy that continues to extend over two hundred years later, past me
now beyond 2046. What is the consequence of excavating this ghost? I do not know, though it
worries me.
My difference is paraded in the academy, yet it works for me even as I loathe it as a marker
of me. Racial capitalism, in one of its many forms. You sell objects, I sell knowledge. Or I’m
supposed to, anyway. I think. You sell self-as-object, and I sell self-as-object, though mine is
wrapped in degrees and CV lines and fancy language and I don’t think I’m doing any of this
very well. You had no choice, agency stunted, bound like your feet, confined to the embroidered
borders that constitute your object-hood. I…have choice. Do I?
Is it possible to share a memory with someone you’ve never met? Is it possible to have the same
memory as with someone you’ve never met, never can meet? Can you remember something that
hasn’t happened yet?
I wish I could sit with you.
“moy”//”mui”
printed in exhibition zine New seed. XXXXXX. New seed. XXXXXX.
Human Resources LA, July 2022

25
Chapter 02: positions
How do we arrive at this body of work? The present body of work that comprises this dis-
sertation cannot be separated from the more immediate conditions of its emergence. Shortly after
completing the written portion of my doctoral qualifying exams in February 2020, and shortly
after the making of blue willow shards, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, intimately and drastically
reordering and destabilizing the normative ways of existing. For those of us fortunate enough to
“work from home”, for a little while, life — time — felt suspended. We found ourselves stag-
nant, foreclosed from public life and movement. We were isolated alone, perhaps with friends, or
in small family clusters. There was danger in being together. Hundreds, then thousands of people
were dying every day from a deadly virus that we didn’t yet have a vaccine for and we were still
learning about. Those initial few weeks-turned-months following instantiations of lockdowns and
stay-at-home orders were filled with a collective sense of immense uncertainty and fear . Amidst
this suspension, I recall challenges to capitalist modes of work and production and calls for rest,
community, and care. For us working from home, everyday life became colored by a strange
spatiotemporal sensation, hypermediated by digital platforms, tools, and collapsed modes of
communication, suspended between the multiplicitous rectilinear frames of screens and media
apparatuses. In addition to the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has seen intense socio-political
division and geopolitical and economic instability with an increasing amount of devastating
climate disasters. In the United States, sociopolitical division has engendered both mass Black
Lives Matter protests in summer 2020 in light of the police murder of George Floyd as well as
the January 6, 2021 attempted coup of the United States Capitol by white supremacists encour-
aged by former president Donald Trump, ongoing mass shootings, the revocation of Roe vs.
Wade. Perhaps it goes without saying, but this is an inadequate recapitulation of how we have
arrived at the present context. The last two years of this PhD and the production of this body of
work has occurred within an extended period of crisis and socio-political instability.
First reported and spread in Wuhan, China, Covid-19 was quickly racialized against Chi-
nese and Asians broadly, engendering anti-Asian sentiment and violence. Then-president Donald
26
Trump and his followers deployed Orientalist rhetoric to describe the virus, calling it the “Wuhan
virus” and “kung-flu” and building on longstanding associations between the Asian body and
virality, contagion, perversity, and disease that stem from colonial discourses. The contention
around masking also contributed to anti-Asian sentiment and discourse, as the mask operated as
mutable surface/signifier of Asian racialization and surface aesthetics. It is quite literally a me -
diating surface boundary that “while filtering air particles, obscures the face and stalls speech…
reanimating language of [Asian] inscrutability that conflates visual obfuscation with suspicion,
silence, and docility.”
1

As a result of the anxiety of the virus/pandemic and Covid-19’s racialization, there was
a significant increase in anti-Asian violence, particularly against elders and women. There was
a 334 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021, up from a 124 percent increase in the
year before, and the initiative Stop AAPI Hate collected 10,370 reports of hate incidents from
March 2020 to September 2021. Elders were beaten and attacked with acid, women were pushed
onto train tracks. The increased violence against Asians reflects a role that Asians have histori-
cally played within the American imaginary as a surface to displace and project anxieties of the
body, morality, and labor onto. For instance, with the Asian racialization of the face mask during
the Covid-19 pandemic, the significatory association of the mask with suspicion, silence, same -
ness, and contagion directly reflect US American anxieties around notions of liberty, individual -
ism, free speech, labor, and morality.
(Review section on legal personhood/immigration. Techno-Orientalism. Inhuman
Figures - Robot, Clone, Alien. Automaton/Model. Robot. Dolls, mannequins. Ways
that “Asians” have always persisted alongside imaginary/science-fiction + aes -
theticization. Race + labor)
Amidst all the tragedy and uncertainty of the last few years, institutional life continued,
mediated by screens and software. As mentioned in the prior essay, this work reflects and con -
tends with the impacts of existing within Western institutional contexts and having led multiple
institutional lives, namely within the Protestant church (I am a pastor’s kid, a.k.a. a “pk”), the
27
conservatory, computational/new media art, and academia. I spent the pandemic between Los
Angeles and Vancouver. Pandemic isolation built on Ph.D isolation, and as I attempted to con-
tinue with dissertation research, I realized and began to reckon with how much of my being has
been shaped and structured by institutional life and its whiteness. In On Being Included: Racism
and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012) Sara Ahmed notes “if we get used to inhabiting white-
ness (it can be a survival strategy to learn not to see it, to learn not to see how you are not reflect -
ed back by what is around), it does not mean whiteness does not still affect us.”
2
I do not want to
dwell here long, but the air I have breathed throughout my institutional life/ves has been heavy
with whiteness.
Due to logics of diversity and institutional life, the heightened broader social attention to
politics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and representation (again understood as part of colonial/
modern discourses that structure our world) exacerbated the awareness of my own existence as a
(minoritized) racialized and gendered being within our hypermediated institutional spaces and re-
lations. During the pandemic period of online learning, I served as the graduate teaching assistant
for the School of Cinematic Arts’ Graduate Diversity Lab twice, including in spring 2021. On
March 16, 2021 amidst a spike in anti-Asian violence, eight people were murdered in a shooting
spree in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women. Four were Korean. The shooter targeted three
day spas and massage parlours in an attempt to eliminate the “temptation” to his self-professed
“sexual addiction”, revealing the interlocking logics of race, gender, and sexuality within this
act of violence. Sociologist Nancy W. Yuen places the shootings within a larger “nationwide
pattern of Asian women being disproportionately targeted in hate incidents”, noting that “racism
has always intersected with sexism for Asian American women” in the United States.
3
Feminist
film scholar Celine Parreñas-Shimizu observes, “as subjects, Asian American women are born
into a world where a representational tradition of hypersexuality forms and shapes general con-
sciousness.”
4
Again, I do not want to dwell here long but as an Asian woman and as the teaching
assistant, in the diversity lab session following the shootings (about a week later) I recall feeling
overexposed and hypervisible, exacerbated by students’ private messages I received in response
28
to the lab instructor’s inappropriate and inadequate facilitation of the conversation acknowledg-
ing the event. I make note of this incident not to criticize or direct blame at anyone, but to note
that institutions and institutional life remain bound by colonial logics that directly impact their
inhabitants — and I continue to grapple with my own inhabitance of such contexts.
Furthermore, this project has always existed within the context of having to quite literally,
“write a dissertation,” which in more traditional academic disciplines would typically consist of
a multi-chapter precursor to the tenure-granting academic monograph. While the permissiveness
of this practice-based Ph.D in Media Arts + Practice frees me from having to perform that partic-
ular gesture, I still find myself compelled to produce at the very least an approximation of such a
project. Though this creative body of work moves beyond what we would traditionally recognize
as “writing” in its use of multiple forms and modes of media, these pieces have emerged while
participating in a series of writing workshops and programs that encouraged me to probe and
consider my relations to writing, self, and media.
In the Spring of 2022 I participated in Holly Willis’ Creative Critical Writing Workshop,
an experimental craft-based workshop that invites students to explore techniques of writing about
— or with, alongside, or near film, still images, sound, and other forms of media. This course has
bookended my time in Media Arts + Practice; I also participated in the workshop in spring 2017,
during my first year in the program. The course has given space to consider writing and criticism
expansively, and for me engendered an experimental process of writing with and against existing
pieces of media in ways that felt inaccessible to me before. In addition, in May 2022, I joined a
twelve-week arts writing mentorship program run by Centre A, Vancouver’s International Cen-
tre for Contemporary Asian Art, which ran up to the week of the dissertation exhibition. As an
eight-member cohort of “Asian-identifying” emerging artists and writers, we met weekly with
established writers, curators, editors, and program mentors to discuss our relationships to writing
and learn more about navigating the arts writing world as Asian writers and artists. A number of
works that comprise this dissertation directly or indirectly came about as part of my engagement
in these writing workshop spaces — the preface to the exhibition zine, “moy”//“mui”, INTER-
29
LINKED, and untitled:aftertheevent. These pieces in part contend with racialized and gendered
forms of labor and violence that are often elided or not recognized as such, and attempt to sur-
face the impacts and consequences how we discursively form and conceptualize Asian bodies
within our social and cultural imaginaries, which are deeply informed by not only by political
and economic discourse, but also by the entanglements with cultural/aesthetic sites and institu-
tions, including cinema, art, fashion, video games, music, and social media broadly.
As a final thread to the institutional context I have been laying out thus far , within the
neoliberal logics of academia and the art world, there is an acute pressure to make oneself and
one’s work transparent, legible, relevant. We exist within an attention economy that prioritizes
spectacle and surface, newness and technology. The self is a product, a brand to be put on dis-
play, sold and consumed, a CV to be built and lengthened. I’ve always felt great discomfort with
this aspect of institutional life, but it seems necessary in order to survive in this world (ostensibly
by getting a job). I’m grateful to be joining the faculty in Digital Futures at OCAD University in
Toronto where this work will continue in all of its forms and affects.
—
How then to enter into this body of work? What is the frame? Is that not the point of all this
writing? Yet it is not so easy given the imbricating and conflicting positions I occupy. Filmmaker,
theorist, and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha notes
the growing ethnic-femininist consciousness has made it increasingly difficult for
her to turn a blind eye not only to the specification of the writer as historical subject
(who writes? And in what context?), but also to writing itself as a practice located
at the intersection of subject and history — a literary practice that involves the pos-
sible knowledge (linguistical and ideological) of itself as such. On the one hand,
no matter what position she decides to take, she will sooner or later find herself
driven into situations where she is made to feel she must choose from among three
conflicting identities. Writer of color? Woman writer? Or woman of color? Which
comes first? Where does she place her loyalties? On the other hand, she often finds
herself at odds with language, which partakes in the white-male-is-norm ideology
and is used predominantly as a vehicle to circulate established power relations. This
is further intensified by her finding herself also at odds with her relation to writing,
which when carried out uncritically often proves to be one of domination: as hold-
er of speech, she usually writes from a position of power, creating as an ‘author,’
situating herself above her work and existing before it, rarely simultaneously with
it. Thus, it has become almost impossible for her to take up her pen without at the
30
same time questioning her relation to the material that defines her and her creative
work.
5
Minh-ha’s essay “Commitments from the Writing-Mirror Box” articulates how writing, in its
circularity and referentiality, presents a dilemma (a “triple bind”) for the “triply jeopardized”
woman-of-color writer. Writing is already caught up in gendered and racialized modes of la-
bor — who is permitted to write, the privileged time, how they write, in what voice. For the
woman-of-color who writes, who occupies multiplicitous and uncertain positionality, “writing
woman” fragments into modes, strategies, approaches, tactics that intersect, align, and contradict.
First is the “Priest-God” scheme, where the writer is connected to a greater Feminine energy
and is the conduit for God’s message. This positions her as “omniscient and omnipresent, she is
everywhere and understands everything at the same time”. She disperses herself in the writing,
leaving readers and critics in a process of contextualizing, guessing, unraveling. In this formation
and “charged with intentionality, writing is therefore disclosing (a secret), and reading is believ-
ing.”
6
The second schema acknowledges the endless “to-and-fro movement between the written
woman and the writing woman.” This is the writer that lets go of her self in hopes of finding/
forming her self; this is writing as an “ongoing practice that may be said to be concerned, not
with inserting a ‘me’ into language, but with creating an opening where the ‘me’ disappears
while ‘I’ endlessly come and go, as the nature of language requires.” Minh-ha notes that there
is danger in this, that the embodiment of the shared process of Life/Death may lead to the belief
in a purer-truth that obliterates the self and leads back to the mirror-box. (“Writing as an incon-
sequential process of sameness/otherness is ceaselessly re-breaking and re-weaving patterns of
ready-mades. The written bears the written to infinity.”)
7
The third strategy is the now-familiar feminist “write your body.” The body demands its
boundaries, limitations, consequences. It is a voice that must be heard and listened to. The wom-
an writer’s body raises the point of difference of gender and power — and its relation to repro-
ductive organs, capacities, allegories. Writings are birthed, they gestate, move through the body.
31
The “womb” becomes a site that is leveraged differently for genders; for men the “womb” can
separate a part of woman from woman, allowing them to lay legal claim to it, as well as to sepa-
rate it from the other parts of her (body and mind). She becomes their fabrication: a “specialized,
infant-producing organ.” On the other hand, women use “womb” to “re-appropriate it and re-
unite (or re-differ) themselves, their bodies, their places of production.” This process of writing
from the womb, from the body, is nurturing, a way of “keeping-alive”; it resists separation of and
into parts. It is a repetitive gestation that creates woman — defined by Cixous as “whole com -
posed of parts that are wholes” born repeatedly through language. This is connected to a queer-
ness, a writing of and from the whole self as a kind of bisexuality. A queer (non-homonormative)
reproduction.
8

In the fourth and final mode, Min-ha suggests and examines writing the (woman) body
in theory. Min-ha calls for an unsettling of our relations, a reactivation of the nascent stages of
the modernist project that shifts the relation to knowledge and theory from mastery to non-mas-
tery by calling everything into question. Now that we write woman’s body, the relation to the-
ory becomes suspect; its position as the “V oice of Knowledge” needs to be called into question
through language and “writing the body”, a process that is enacted and formulates a new relation
to theory. Towards what ends? Writing-the-body is a “way of making theory in gender, of making
of theory a politics of everyday life, thereby re-writing the ethnic female subject as site of dif-
ferences. It is on such a site and in such a context that resistance to theory yields more than one
reading…Woman as subject can only redefine while being defined by language.”
9

I have been touched by all these modes, yet their traces cannot be so easily identified or delineat -
ed — which forces to trust?
Elsewhere cultural theorist Rey Chow notes that in the “irreducibility of language as a
phenomenological actor,” colonial processes such as racialization “demands to be grasped first
and foremost as an experience of language, not least because lingual relations are themselves
caught up in the aggressive procedures of setting apart that racialized naming and interpellation
ineluctably intensify…even as one transcribes and expresses oneself through skin, as one must,
32
it also wounds and humiliates one.”
10
Queer Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa writes “my dilem-
ma, and that of other Chicana and women-of-color writers, is twofold: how to write (produce)
without being inscribed (reproduced) in the dominant white structure and how to write without
reinscribing and reproducing what we rebel against.”
11
Perhaps it is cliché and tired to say so, but
we privilege the written word too strongly.
This dilemma of the circularity of writing is also reflected in critiques of the Western
academy as one part of the university as a colonial institution. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia
Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu note in the introduction to Decolonising the University, “it was
in the university that colonial intellectuals developed theories of racism, popularised discours-
es that bolstered support for colonial endeavours and provided ethical and intellectual grounds
for the dispossession, oppression and domination of colonised subjects”.
12
Further than this, the
university (and more specifically the Western academy) not only created the intellectual grounds
for the “dispossession, oppression, and domination of colonised subjects”, but is a key part of
the very possibility and production of the colonized subject that is dispossessed, oppressed, and
dominated through the making of colonial difference. As decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo puts
it: “the enunciated is always invented by the enunciators (actors, institutions, languages), rather
than the other way around”.
13
This intersects with what Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith
calls “research through ‘imperial’ eyes”, an approach that leverages “systems of classification
and representation [that] enable different traditions or fragments of traditions to be retrieved and
reformulated in different contexts as discourses, and then to be played out in systems of power
and domination, with real material consequences for colonized peoples”.
14
Academic organi-
zation and disciplinary formation are part of a “system of power which blocks, prohibits, and
invalidates” other forms of discourse and knowledge; “intellectuals are themselves agents of this
system of power”.
15
In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe observes the “modern divi-
sion of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to
the modern national university, has profoundly shaped the inquiry into [“New World” colonial]
connections”.
16
The academy, organized into schools, colleges, centers, degree levels, degree
33
types, disciplines, majors, and specializations all work to instantiate the academy’s own “exper-
tise” and authority while also creating the very terms, conditions, and domains of colonial differ-
ence. The formalization of fields such as ethnic studies creates what Lowe terms an “inevitable
paradox” that forces submission to the demands of the university and its “educative function of
socializing subjects into the state.”
17
Anzaldúa further notes, “those in the academy find them -
selves constantly trafficking in different and often contradictory class and cultural locations; they
find themselves in the cracks between the world.”
18
The colonial organization of knowledge surfaces in the oft-asked and seemingly benign
question, “So, what’s your [research, dissertation, project] about?” Identifying a shared irritation
with aesthetic and queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz in her essay “It’s Not about Anything”,
literary theorist Kandice Chuh points out that the question of “aboutness” operates as an as-
sessment of relevance, an “instrumental analytic” that more notably is also a determination of
time-worthiness, “as in, is this lecture or book [and/or artwork] worth my time?”
19
The logic
behind the question of “aboutness” permeates and structures the organization of knowledge in
the academy and its partitions into fields, disciplines, and methodologies, evident in exam lists
and course titling, and the forms and venues in which knowledge is shared (conferences, publica-
tions, exhibitions, symposia, etc.).
Chuh arrives at this offering by asking “What is Asian American literature about?” Or,
“in perhaps more skeptical and sometimes aggressive form, what is Asian American/queer/black/
feminist/brown about that piece of writing, music, criticism?”
20
By challenging the subject of
literary and critical production and the conditions of its emergence, Chuh reveals how institution-
al forms of knowledge continue to produce and intensify mentalities that hold knowledge forma-
tions apart from each other. She states,
I am among those who locate the critical leverage of Asian Americanist critique in
the fact that taking Asiatic racialization seriously opens and sometimes compels
avenues of inquiry and raises questions and creates archives that would otherwise
be unavailable. Such a stance is counter to the ways that the field is read by those
seemingly external to (and sometimes within) it and, within the field coverage mod-
el, as producing knowledge “about” Asian Americans. Despite the fictionality of
the construct “Asian American” or the ways that the scholarship identifies Asian
34
Americanness as a problem space for the consideration of everything from the on-
to-epistemologies of modernity to the circulation of capital in the era of global-
ization, a rubric like Asian American literature announces its subject matter as the
Asian American rather than the literature. In brief and crude terms, “aboutness”
indexes the specific ways in which race operates within the modern regime of truth
as it structures the academy.
21
As Tuhiwai Smith points out, “the concept of discipline is even more interesting when we think
about it not simply as a way of organizing systems of knowledge but also as a way of organizing
people or bodies”;
22
that is, “research has not been neutral in its objectification of the Other . Ob-
jectification is a process of dehumanization”.
23
“Aboutness” enacts representational processes of
definition and determination that prefigure the divisions and relations of knowledge, halting the
potential to engage in different modes and practices of world-making.
This epistemological quandary has been long noted and discussed, particularly within the
interrelated and blurry sites of “Asia studies”, “Asian American studies”, “ethnic studies”, “dias-
pora studies” and related fields. In Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001)
editors Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa note the disciplinary constructions of “Asia” and
“Asian American” as epistemological objects, suggesting “working from the eccentric perspec-
tive of the Asian diaspora” as way of attending to “how ‘Asia’ materializes through historically
specific institutional and symbolic economies.”
24
In more specific terms, literary scholar Laura
Hyun Yi Kang articulates the epistemological binds tied into the discursive specification, “Asian/
American women.” Here, the “intervening slash” is a “diacritically awkward shorthand for the
cultural, economic, and geopolitical pressures of the continental (Asian), the national (Ameri-
can), and the racial-ethnic (Asian American) as they come to bear on an implicitly more solid
gendered ontology (women).”
25
Her study Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American
Women (2002) tracks the conditions under which “Asian/American women” have become vis-
ible and legible, a process intimately and vexingly tied to “disciplinary regimes of codification
and documentation.”
26
The use of “Asian/American” foregrounds the taut and relational nature
of the term as an political and epistemological formation, building on work by scholars such
as David Palumbo-Liu, who notes in Asia/America: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier
35
(1999), “Asian American social subjectivity now vacillates between whiteness and color…its
function is…to trace a racial minority’s possibilities for assimilation.”
27
In addition to collecting
together an “unwieldy set of points of ‘origin’ traceable to different Asian states”, the construc-
tion “Asian/American” points to the tension of this trajectory: “as in the construction ‘and/or,’…
the solidus at once instantiates a choice between two terms, their simultaneous and equal status,
and an element of indecidability…as it once implies exclusion and inclusion, ‘Asian/American’
marks both the distinction between ‘Asian’ and ‘American’ and a dynamic, unsettled, inclusive
movement” between them.”
28

Kang thus proposes the “Asian/American woman” as a “productive configuration” for
“trenchant interdisciplinarity” where “interdisciplinarity” signals not an accumulative acknowl-
edgement of combining methods and objects from multiple disciplines, but rather an “ongoing
problematic and contestation about their proper and most productive location in relation to the
academic disciplines.”
29
Kang expands this purview in Traffic in Asian Women (2020), where she
leverages “Asian women as method” to trace how “Asian women” might be “reframed not as a
bounded and knowable population but as a critical prompt for mapping varying configurations of
power, knowledge, and justice.”
30

This call to interdisciplinarity echoes Trinh T. Minh-ha’s articulation and approach; as a
composer, filmmaker, theorist, and writer, she states, “Interdisciplinarity has, in my context, not
been a question of accumulating expertise — that is, of gathering and juxtaposing specialized
knowledge while leaving their boundaries intact. It is rather one of working on their very en-
counters so as to substantially shift and alter them.”
31
Yet as philosophers and artists Erin Man-
ning and Brian Massumi observe, the professionalization of artistic practice and institutionaliza-
tion of interdisciplinarity — “where collaboration really means that disciplines continue to work
in their own institutional corners as much as before, meeting only at the level of research results”
does “little to create new potential for a thinking-with and -across techniques of creative prac-
tice.”
32
Disciplines and their configurations of knowledge production often overlook the dif fering
relationships to objects of study and the intellectual processes that bring them into being, assum-
36
ing shared orientations and trajectories for how knowledge is considered, produced, and shared.
What does it mean to do “interdisciplinary research” within a practice-based PhD? What does
it mean to locate or situate creative practice within interdisciplinary contexts? How does one
orient towards the methods, objects, goals, and results of research and knowledge production?
“Interdisciplinarity” is brought forward not only within the theoretical and critical contexts of
the work, but is further reflected at the aesthetic point of contact through which others encounter
the work and research. What is the “thing” that is worth encountering? What is the object worth
knowing? Being in relation with. To what ends? Sara Ahmed notes “organizations can be consid-
ered as modes of attention: what is attended to can be thought of as what is valued; attention is
how some things come into view (and other things do not).”
33
As observed by arguments present-
ed earlier, the process of identifying and determining the objects of inquiry holds real material
and psychological consequences for colonized peoples.
In D-Passage: The Digital Way, Trinh T. Minh-ha writes
I don’t see the relationship between content and form as complementary. They are
inseparable: a single reality, like the two facets of the same coin. In this monkey
business of the mind, one can say that the forces of the form determine the forces
of the content; both the “what” and the “how” take shape during the creative pro-
cess. You don’t pour new content into an old, pre-prescribed mold, because you’ll
then remain in conformity.
34
This approach to creative practice holds significant ramifications and promise for those whose
work facilitates personal and autobiographical dimensions. When asked about the relations of her
work (which spans documentary, video, film, writing, sound, music) to autobiography, Minh-
ha notes the shared space with the use of terms such as “autoethnography, bio-mythography, or
autobiophotography,” (and I would add autotheoretical to this) stating
In telling one’s story, one is told. I’s comings and goings in the verbal or visual
text is a linguistic necessity, but it is an empty site where many I’s can find a
habitat...The art and practices of the self is not a mere matter of retrieving one’s
individual past; it is an investigation of the self and other that also involves an in-
quiry into the tools of investigation — here film, video, or writing. To picture and
relay events of one’s life activities is potentially to produce new knowledge in a
field of infinite relations. With such a transformative process of self-discovery and
self-invention, one can explore the creative aspect of self-narration, or, as in my
case, of narrations that take the self as an experiential site of reference — while
37
addressing questions of representation and identity, of personal and collective
memory. Such an exploration calls attention to the instance of consumption and
contributes to the emergence of new subjectivities.
35
Gloria Anzaldúa considers writing as a “gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working
from the inside out…writing begins with the impulse to push boundaries, to shape ideas, imag-
es, and words that travel through the body and echo in the mind into something that has never
existed. The writing process is the same mysterious process that we use to make the world.”
36
In
an interview with Nancy N. Chen, Trinh T. Minh-ha articulates a method of “speaking nearby” in
her filmwork. “Speaking nearby” is a
speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from
the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on
itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming
it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening up
to other possible moments of transition…this is not just a technique or a statement
to be made verbally. It is an attitude in life, a way of positioning oneself in relation
to the world.
37

Theorizing processes of translation and creolization, Caribbean philosopher and playwright
Edouard Glissant proposes and encourages Relation as a radical site of destabilization and pos-
sibility, for “in Relation every subject is an object and every object a subject.”
38
The poetics of
Relation “remains forever conjectural and presupposes no ideological stability. It is against the
comfortable assurances linked to the supposed excellence of a language. A poetics that is latent,
open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible.”
39
In closely ana-
lyzing the principles and processes that form the modern (Kantian) subject, philosopher Denise
Ferreria Da Silva writes
Towards re-imagining sociality, the principle of nonlocality supports a kind of
thinking that does not reproduce the methodological and ontological grounds of
the modern subject, namely linear temporality and spatial separation. Because it
violates these framings of time and space, nonlocality allows us to imagine soci-
ality, in such a way that attending to difference does not presuppose separability,
determinancy, and sequentiality, the three ontological pillars that sustain modern
thought…what nonlocality exposes is a more complex reality in which everything
has both actual (spacetime) and a virtual (nonlocal) existence.
40
Towards this, da Silva offers “hacking the subject” less as a method and more as a “refusal as a
38
mode of engagement.”
41
Hacking is a de\compositional process that actively and purposefully
mis-understands, mis-reads, and mis-appropriates, simultaneously exposing, unsettling, and per-
verting while recomposing and imagining anew. Hacking heeds the “ethical mandate to challenge
our thinking, to release the imagination, and to welcome the end of the world as we know it, that
is, decolonization, which is the only proper name for justice.”
42
How to approach this body of work in writing? How to “hack this subject”? How to write
a dissertation without reproducing the violences of modern thought in the constitution of the
subject/self? In what voice? In parallel terms, what can we expect an artwork or a body of work
to hold, to do, to speak to? These questions, in part, draw on what Kandice Chuh calls for in
conceiving of Asian American studies as a “subjectless discourse”, aiming to “create the con-
ceptual space to prioritize difference by foregrounding the discursive constructedness of subjec-
tivity” and to “point attention to the constraints on the liberatory potential of the achievement of
subjectivity, by reminding us that a ‘subject’ only becomes recognizable and can act as such by
conforming to certain regulatory matrices. In that sense, a subject is always also an epistemolog-
ical object.”
43
In Chuh’s conception, “subjectlessness” as a conceptual tool serves as the ethical
grounds for what she calls a “strategic anti-essentialism”, which acknowledges and underwrites
the shared incoherencies within the field and category of “Asian American”.
44
If Asian Ameri-
can studies is subjectless, rather than completing or filling the category of ‘Asian American’, to
“actualize it by such methods as enumerating various components of differences (gender, class,
sexuality, religion[…]), we are positioned to critique the effects of the various configurations of
power and knowledge through which the term comes to have meaning.”
45
The notions of “sub-
jectless discourse” and “strategic anti-essentialism” radically disrupt how we consider the repre-
sentational and relational nature of knowledge production.
Inspired and motivated by the work of Sylvia Wynter, Chuh elaborates this logic in The
Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (2021) and offers possibilities of
an alternative trajectory in her conceptualization of “illiberal humanisms,” which
bring forward an understanding of human beingness to be defined not by discrete
and self-possessed individuality but instead by constitutive relationality; they argue
39
the displacement of the primacy of the visual characterizing the epistemologies
of bourgeois liberal modernity by the generation of rationalities that make sense
through visceral multisensory experiences of the world; they afford the emergence
of a critical taxonomy that features encounter without conquest and entanglement
in lieu of terms and concepts inhering in knowledge paradigms that hold the polit-
ical and cultural, and economic and artistic as discretely bounded realms; and they
facilitate the articulation and elaboration of epistemes thoroughly incommensurate
with the developmental geographies and temporalities of bourgeois liberal human-
ism.
46
How might this come about? Aesthetic inquiry offers one mode; as holding a preoc-
cupation with the particularity and singularity of the art object — aesthetics opens a site that
challenges the specificity and entrenchments of knowledge formation. The aesthetic points to an
encounter with the art object that allows a rewriting of knowledge formations into an alternative
logics of being-with, one that sensorially destabilizes and offers a multisensorial attunement to
the world. At the same time, the aesthetic encounter in itself cannot facilitate such a shift; aes-
thetics has not been neutral in not only how it has contributed to the divisions of who is granted
inclusion and status as the modern liberal subject, but has been foundational in the constitution
of this Universal Subject that necessitates and engenders the subjugation of Others, often along
lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality. In Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aes-
thetics (2019) David Lloyd reads against the Subject seminally proffered by Kant to articulate
how in the name of universality aesthetics and aesthetic theory structures relations of power and
domination through what he calls a “regime of representation”. This builds on powerful projects
by philosophers and scholars such as Sylvia Wynter and Walter Mignolo, who have argued for
the “overrepresentation of Man”
44
and the “invention of the Human”
45
as overlapping concepts
within the decolonial project that work to destabilize modernity’s hegemonic entrenchments. One
of the key questions within decolonial and postcolonial thought is not “what is human” but rather
“who determines the category of human”. The idea of “human” is an invention: “human was a
fictional noun pretending to be its ontological representation.” Aesthetic inquiry and practice
that aims for the (re)articulation and (re)presentation of the subject cannot help but reproduce
and reinscribe modernity’s violence and bindings. As Gayatri Spivak’s influential essay “Can the
40
Subaltern Speak?” suggests, representation cannot provide recourse.
Perhaps all this can be summed up by the opening paragraph to feminist philosopher
Luce Irigaray’s essay “When Our Lips Speak Together” (1980): “If we continue to speak the
same language to each other, we will reproduce the same story. Begin the same stories all over
again. Don’t you feel it? Listen: men and women around us all sound the same. Same arguments,
same quarrels, same scenes. Same attractions and separations. Same difficulties, the impossibility
of reaching each other. Same…same….Always the same.”
47

Here we are, caught in a language. (Written. English. Academic.) Again and again and again,
always the same.

41
42
when stillness culminates
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
when stillness culminates (2021)
https://fidelialam.com/when-stillness-culminates
62
Chapter 03: relations (a proposal in world-making)
Where do these aporia leave us then? Let’s do this one more time. This time as a proposal. An
invitation.
How do we arrive at this body of work?
This dissertation body of work presents a grappling with manifestations of racial and
aesthetic violence within institutional life. Each piece in this body of work enacts a sounding that
reveal and responds to colonial/modern histories and forms of discourse, a series of provocations
as tending to and inhabiting racialized affective sites. Together they trace transpacific paths of
relation across multiple spatio-temporal streams. From the exhibition space, to the space of the
frame and of the page, they are imperfect, each their own attempt at making this all a bit clearer,
available, accessible, felt. I arrive at this work multisensorially and relationally oriented — tex-
turally, materially, rhythmically, in terms of haptics and duration — perceptual terms that do not
necessarily prioritize the visual. I hope the writing thus far has provided some conceptual context
and information around the conditions of this body of work’s production, as well as some insight
into questions and concerns I continue to contend with. I want to emphasize that the making of
the work has been a highly intuitive process, informed by a set of praxes that engages sound, vi-
bration, duration, movement, code, and light as material and spatial enactments. While the works
might appear serious or somber from one vantage point, they are playful and pleasurable from
others.
I was raised speaking Cantonese, the dominant language in Hong Kong that is slowly dis-
appearing, and that I am slowly losing. In Indelible City, Louisa Lim writes “unlike standardized
Mandarin, Cantonese is gloriously irregular, its rules of pronunciation so casual that some words
can be pronounced with either an initial n or l sound, used interchangeably…To this day, there’s
still no consensus about which of two romanization systems should be used or even how many
tones Cantonese has; the range is five to eleven, depending on whom you ask.”
1
Growing up, my
family and I would pick a syllable — let’s say for example “ma” — and move our way through
all the possible tones and meanings, giggling at the repetition and subtle differences in intonation
63
that require nuanced physiological shifts. Ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma. (ma, ma, ma). Cantonese
doesn’t stay still, it slips and slides, and tonal mispronunciation can drastically shift meanings,
opening routes to playful misinterpretations and meanings. Because of its imperial influences,
Hong Kong dialect bounces between Cantonese, English, and Mandarin, and like many other
multilingual places, one sentence might rapidly jump between all three. The play of tonal slip-
pages and promiscuous translation and substitution are embedded within this project, not only
within linguistic terms, but affective dimensions as well.
Before I learned how to write with words, I learned how to compose and attune to space
through sound, vibration, and movement in daily practice. I learned that from the space of the
page, to the piano key, to the body of the piano, to the space of the room or hall, and as sound
and image come into intimate contact with the inner spaces of body/mind — composition is a
multiplicitous and reflexive process, an ongoing process of forming being. This perspective has
developed and continued through my parkour practice, a movement discipline that involves run-
ning, jumping, vaulting, and climbing through the urban landscape, and I have previously written
about how parkour invites queer attention and inhabitance of urban space. This way of tending to
the world has also been informed in the messy and digestive processes of working with code and
other digital tools to create multimedia assemblages that linger in and at various sites and scales.
Writing has always been about shaping a space as a practice of inhabitance, its particular modes
and affects determined by the materials used. While my practice (and this body of work that
comprises the dissertation) is deeply informed by theoretical discourse, the modes of writing that
hold most significance for me are primarily through multimodal aesthetic practice and the craft -
ing and composition of an event through sound, code, light (projection, video, animation), inter-
action, and space. At present, there are limits to what I can express in words. Theory is another
tool within the compositional process. In bringing various aesthetic modes and concerns together,
I tend to the embodied and relationally multimodal sensorial ways we attune to the world and
make it “make sense”. The work arrives in its form for a reason. I want us to stay close to it.
While I find affinities and alliances with the thinkers mentioned here (and many who are
64
not), at present I am wary of inscribing explicit meanings and connections; rather this serves as
initial probing of a shared question space, a momentary stabilization of our ground necessary in
order to continue doing this work. Perhaps it is already evident by the somewhat elliptical trajec-
tory we have traced, but at present I am less interested in working/walking through each piece as
though it is its own contained entity, abstracted away from its messy and uncertain origins. I am
dubious of how pointing to its processes and explicating the various theoretical, political, social,
cultural contexts from which they emerge might shift or shape the work, or rather (to be blunt)
what value it adds. I’m wary of the overdetermination of language as it orients, directs, and shifts
perception. I feel as though I can only speak to my own hopes/desires of what this body of work
suggests, opens up. I remain reticent to make claims of what it does or the effectiveness/“suc-
cess” of how it communicates, speaks to. I do this in hopes of maintaining the work’s openness.
Directly explaining the work and connecting its threads would close it off to further liveliness,
something I would like to resist. This is not an outright refusal of ever writing “about” this work,
but rather stems from a desire to move slowly in relation to this work. I am in the process of
finding language, in a process of languaging. The project in this form arrives at this landing site,
a place of rest before we continue on this trajectory.
This body of work in part asks what determines worlds we make, make visible, shape,
surface, bring forward in this ongoing project of world-making, as a set of praxes that we engage
in relationally, together. While there is the possibility of reading the work representationally
(particularly given the form and limits of this mode of sharing that structures this dissertation
and modern communication writ large), I hope the work can be encountered in its relational and
lively capacities, that it might offer an encounter that you (and everything that makes you, “you”)
might be affected by. I invite you to immerse yourself and to soak into these spaces of the page,
the window, the frame, the scroll, of Relation. Within and between pieces. The work is not fin-
ished; it has only just begun.
This dissertation has presented some unruly threads and attempted to weave them togeth-
er, and now I pass them onto you.
65

66
INTERLINKED
67
68
INTERLINKED is a speculative city symphony and critical rewriting of Denis Villenueve’s Blade
Runner 2049 (2017). Polyphonically written, the experimental animation features descriptions
and directions from the film script, processed imagery from the film and typographic treatment of
dialogue from the film, and experimental writing crafted in conversation with the replicants of the
film. INTERLINKED speaks to and from the relational spaces between the replicant characters of
Blade Runner 2049 and the architectures of its dystopian Los Angeles landscape. The polyphonic
multilayered address works to blur the boundaries of self, speaker, subjects, objects, humans, and
non-humans while interrogating the colonial logics of subject formation in and through language.
https://fidelialam.com/interlinked
Screenshots from INTERLINKED
69
untitled:aftertheevent
70
71
72
copper piping, plastic string, ink on Tyvek, lamp
Human Resources LA, July 2022
installation assistants: cole slater, katie luo, ann hoang
“source images”: Bolton, Andrew, Adam Geczy, Maxwell K. Hearn, Homay King, Harold Koda,
Mei Mei Rado, Wong Kar-wai, and John Galliano. China: Through the Looking Glass. First Edi-
tion edition. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.
https://fidelialam.com/untitledaftertheevent
73
f(...)
74
piping, hot glue, flame retardant plastics, three-channel projection
production assistants: cole slater, katie luo, katrina meng, ann hoang
installed at Human Resources Los Angeles, July 2022
From the sensor to the frame to the projection and screen, ideological and media apparatuses
have privileged the representation of particular modes of being and subjectivities (Man/Human)
through normative encodings and relational alignments of these perspectival apparatuses and sites.
This piece purposely misaligns these sites to attend to the aesthetic and affective excesses of those
that cannot be contained by coherent or legible representational apparatuses.
The piece draws on aesthetic logics and traditions of shanshui painting and features hanging
scrolls constructed with flame retardant plastics and projections, a questioning of the racialization
of matter and politics of disposability via a reordering of the relation between figure and ground as
articulated by philosopher Yuk Hui’s Art and Cosmotechnics (2020).
The projected animations are recursively made video assemblages of the artist with minor color
corrections, reflecting on how notions of race and gender are technologically encoded and of pro-
cesses of self-orientalization, drawing on the techno-ornamental trope of the commercialized-ar-
chitectural-holographic-cybernetic Asiatic femme found in science-fiction and cyberpunk anime
and films. The textures, a combination of video and generative visuals, tend to the replicability and
plasticity of this figure in hopes of finding queer kin and solidarities in unexpected sites.
https://fidelialam.com/f-01
75
76
77
78
79
Endnotes
preface
* Clicking leads to https://vimeo.com/770959836/c35e05a702
introduction
1 Han, Byung-Chul. The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering.
Translated by Daniel Steuer. 1st edition. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity, 2017.
2 The epistolary address in this section is an invocation of Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of
Mercy, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021.
3 Minh-ha, Trinh T. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural
Politics. 1 edition. New York: Routledge, 1991.
4 Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
5 Rhee, Margaret. “In Search of My Robot: Race, Technology, and the Asian American
Body.” S&F Online. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/margaret-rhee-in-search-
of-my-robot-race-technology-and-the-asian-american-body/.
6 Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997.
7 “The feminine becomes elaborated as darkness and abyss, as void and chaos, as that
which is both fundamentally spatial and as that which deranges or unhinges the smooth mapping
and representation of space, a space that is too self-proximate, too self-enclosed to provide the
neutrality, the coordinates, of self-distancing, to produce and sustain a homogeneous, abstract
space. The feminine becomes a matrix that defies coordinates, that defies the systematic function -
ing of matrices that propose to order and organize the field.” Grosz, Elizabeth, and Peter Eisen -
man. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, Mass: The
MIT Press, 2001, 158.
“The V oid: a tissue which is formed as its meshes (mirage, event, nothing, unreal reality, the
matte, suspension) takes shape. And it is in relation to the V oid that these meshes are woven.
Writing unravels (délie; dé-lit) and weaves (relie; relit); it repeats tirelessly the same gesture.”
Minh-ha, Trinh T. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics. 1
edition. New York: Routledge, 1991, 214.
essay 01: orientations
1 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Prax-
is. Duke University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11g9616.
2 Chien, Christopher. “‘A Ubiquity Made Visible’: Non-Sovereign Visuality, Plastic Flow-
ers, and Labor in Cold War Hong Kong.” Amerasia Journal 47, no. 2 (2021): 188–207. https://
doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2021.2009419. 192.
3 Ibid, 190.
4 Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822375647.
5 David S Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A Niu. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in
Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
6 Chien, “A Ubiquity Made Visible”, 190.
80
7 Chow, Rey. Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading. 1st edition.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. 157.
8 Ibid, 151.
9 Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. First edition
edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1997. 4.
10 Lim, Louisa. Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong . New York: Riv-
erhead Books, 2022, 154.
11 In “Across currents: Connects between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific studies”, Nicole
Poppenhagen and Jens Temmen note that the work of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy on the “Black
Atlantic” and “oceanic discourse” has provided “necessary points of departure for understanding
the conditions of diaspora and the routes of imperialism in the Pacific” as a contact zone that is
marked by racial logics. While the contextual specificities of transpacific and transatlantic studies
should remain distinct, this conceptual shift towards the “inclusion of oceanic, water, and island
spaces” moves us away from land-based “continental fixation” and towards an understanding
of the Pacific as a contested space of race and empire. Nicole Poppenhagen and Jens Temmen,
“Across Currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies,” Atlantic Studies
(Abingdon, England) 15, no. 2 (2018): 149–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2017.139413
1. Similarly, in Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, editors Janet Hoskins and Viet
Thanh Nguyen note that attention to the Pacific requires triangulating between “Asia”, “Amer -
ica”, and the “Pacific” simultaneously as a contact zone which connects intersecting and con -
tradictory imperial narratives of the Pacific as a space of conquest, circulation, and commerce.
Attention to the Pacific and its flows also destabilizes and challenges notions of identity forma -
tion bounded by national territories and geographies. Janet Hoskins and Trường Thanh Nguyẽ
̂ n,
Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, Intersections (Honolulu: University of Ha-
wai’i Press, 2016).
12 Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
13 Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Reprint edition.
Chicago London: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 8.
14 Karen Michelle Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the En-
tanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), https://doi.
org/10.1515/9780822388128.
15 Nevill, Alexander. Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography. 1st ed. 2021 edition. Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2022, 28.
16 Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Illustrat-
ed edition. Durham ; London: Duke University Press Books, 2018.
17 Huang, Vivian L. Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability.
Duke University Press Books, 2022.
18 See for example, “animatedness” in Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2007); Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis,
Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Cathy
Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020).,
“Oriental inscrutability” in Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nine-
teenth-Century America (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2021). Wen Liu, “Narrating
Against Assimilation and the Empire: Diasporic Mourning and Queer Asian Melancholia,” Wom-
en’ s Studies Quarterly 47, no. 1 & 2 (2019): 176–92, https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2019.0020.
81
19 Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (London ; New York: Rowman & Littlefield Pub -
lishers, 2019).
20 Michelle N. Huang, “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 95–117, https://doi.org/10.1353/
jaas.2017.0006.
Huang draws on feminist new materialist/STS concepts such as Karen Barad’s “agen-
tial realism” and Jane Bennett’s “vitality of matter” to articulate a framework of “ecologies of
entanglement”, which are “networks of circulation that diffuse the boundaries of the human by
foregrounding the relationships between us and the world with which we interact, including
the environment. This framework focuses on the emergence of subjects and objects as effects
of epistemological cuts, which shifts the “object of study” from objects in themselves onto the
phenomena that create and bind them. Ecologies of entanglement also formulate more clearly
the relationship between the discursive and the material, where “discursive practices are not
human-based activities but specific material (re)configurings of the world through which bound -
aries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted.” Thus, while entanglement’s definition
suggests coordination between two particles, thinking about entanglement ecologically allows
for the synthesis of more than two agents, but not in an undifferentiated, free-floating manner.
Ecologies of entanglement describe how material existence is constituted across geographical,
temporal, and conceptual distances.” (98)
The Pacific Ocean is also home to the North Pacific Gyre, the largest of the five main
systems of rotating ocean currents, which crosses the Pacific Rim and connects Hong Kong,
British Columbia, and California. It is also the site of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a concen -
trated aglomeration of debris and trash from multiple continents composed of 90 percent plastic
and is commonly described as twice the size of Texas. As what Michelle N. Huang terms an
“ecology of entanglement”, attending to the racialization of plastic as a “devalued and undertheo-
rized substance” in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch’s ecological plasticity opens lines of inquiry
that challenge fundamental assumptions regarding identity and authenticity. Speaking of Hong
Kong’s transpacific plastic flower trade, Christopher Chien... Within processes of Asian Amer -
ican racialization, plastic and plasticity represents the assimilatory myth of the Asian American
model minority, which also acts as a “strategy of containment” that positions Asian Americans
as a “wedge within the field of black/white race relations in the United States.” Huang writes,
“plastic is the model minority substance: its superficial pliability and lack of resistance serves
as both characteristic and function.” Yet this myth, while synthetic and imaginary, is all too real
(material) in its uses and effects: “as a plastic fiction, once the concept of Asian American as race
is produced, it exists and circulates in the world. Plastic is not fake — it is all too real, and the
troubled boundary between authentic and fake is neither essential nor chance but sociopolitically
determined. Once created, plastic’s fictions bind others in its ecologies of entanglement.” Plastic
does not follow its own “logic of containment; its disintegration is what allows for its molecular
interpenetration and accumulation within bodies.”
21 This quality is what opens a queer reading of plastic, what Heather Davis; intimacy-affect
;; Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2022).
22 Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Dif-
ferentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism - Journal #112 October 2020 - e-Flux.” Accessed November
25, 2022. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/112/352823/the-ancestral-present-of-oceanic-illu -
82
sions-connected-and-differentiated-in-late-toxic-liberalism/.
23 Geontopower is Povinelli’s reconfiguration of Foucault’s biopower, not as a mode of gov -
ernance but rather a “set of discourse, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or
shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife.” Povinelli, Elizabeth
A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016, 4.
“moy”//“mui”
1 Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019),
4.
2 Center, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American. “Inhuman Figures: Robots, Clones, and
Aliens.” Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (blog). https://smithsonianapa.org/inhu-
man-figures/.
3 Lucier, Alvin. I am sitting in a room, (1969).
4 Han, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK ;
Malden, MA: Polity, 2017).
5 Baudrillard, Jean The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, Nineth edition (London ;
New York: V erso, 2006)
6 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of
Minnesota Press, 1992).
essay 02: positions
1 Vivian L. Huang, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability
(Duke University Press Books, 2022), 7.
2 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham ;
London: Duke University Press Books, 2012), 35.
3 Nancy Wang Yuen, “Opinion | Atlanta Suspect’s Excuses Spotlight America’s Sexualized
Racism Problem,” NBC News, accessed November 25, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/
opinion/atlanta-spa-shooting-suspect-s-bad-day-defense-america-s-ncna1261362.
4 Celine Parrenas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Wom-
en on Screen and Scene, Illustrated edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 12.
5 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Under-
lining/margin Notes edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 6.
6 Ibid, 30.
7 Ibid, 35-36.
8 Ibid, 36-38
9 Ibid, 39-40.
10 Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 8.
11 Gloria Anzaldua, Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality,
Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating, Bilingual edition (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University
Press Books, 2015), 7-8.
12 Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nisancioglu, and Delia Gebrial, eds., Decolonizing the
University, Reprint edition (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 5.
13 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis
(Duke University Press, 2018), 196.
83
14 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples,
3rd edition (London: Zed Books, 2021), 46.
15 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977,
ed. Colin Gordon, 1st American Ed edition (New York: Vintage, 1980), 207.
16 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015),
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822375647, 1.
17 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press Books, 1996), 41.
18 Anzaldua, Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro, 71.
19 Kandice Chuh, “It’s Not about Anything,” Social Text 32, no. 4 (2014) https://doi.
org/10.1215/01642472-2820496, 129.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid, 131.
22 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples,
3rd edition (London: Zed Books, 2021), 71.
23 Ibid, 41, emphasis mine.
24 Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, Orientations Mapping Studies in the Asian Di-
aspora, First edition., E-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. (Durham: Duke University Press,
2001), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822381259.
25 Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
26 Ibid, 3.
27 David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5.
28 Ibid, 1.
29 Kang, Compositional Subjects, 21.
30 Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Traffic in Asian Women (Durham NC: Duke University Press,
2020), 16.
31 Trinh T. Minh-ha, D-Passage: The Digital Way (Durham: Duke University Press Books,
2013), 80.
32 Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Expe-
rience (Minneapolis, UNITED STATES: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 88.
33 Ahmed, On Being Included, 30.
34 Minh-ha, D-Passage, 76.
35 Ibid, 66.
36 Anzaldua, Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro, 5.
37 Nancy N. Chen, “‘Speaking Nearby:’ A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha,” Visual
Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (1992): 87.
38 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 32.
39 Ibid.
40 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability, ” 64.
41 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal beyond the
Limits of Critique, ” Philosophia (Albany, N.Y . ) 8, no. 1 (2018): 22.
42 Ibid.
43 Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke Uni-
84
versity Press Books, 2003), 9.
44 Ibid, 10.
45 Ibid, 10-11.
46 Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man”
(Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2019), xi.
47 Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 6, no. 1 (1980): 69.
essay 03: relations (a proposal in world-making)
1 Lim, Louisa. Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (New York: Riv-
erhead Books, 2022), 156.
85
Bibliography
Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. First edition edition.
Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. First Edition edition.
Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006.
Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham ; London:
Duke University Press Books, 2012.
Anzaldua, Gloria. Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality.
Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Bilingual edition. Durham, North Carolina: Duke Univer
sity Press Books, 2015.
Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi V ora. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of
Technological Futures. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2019.
Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to
Matter.” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321.
Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the En
tanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. https://doi.
org/10.1515/9780822388128.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict. Nineth edition. Lon
don ; New York: Verso, 2006.
Bhambra, Gurminder K., Kerem Nisancioglu, and Delia Gebrial, eds. Decolonizing the Universi-
ty. Reprint edition. London: Pluto Press, 2018.
Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Reprint edition. Chica
go London: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Bui, Long T. Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton. Philadelphia: Temple Uni
versity Press, 2022.
Chen, Nancy N. “‘Speaking Nearby:’ A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha.” Visual Anthropol
ogy Review 8, no. 1 (1992): 82–91.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
———. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Revised edi
tion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Chien, Christopher. “‘A Ubiquity Made Visible’: Non-Sovereign Visuality, Plastic Flowers, and
86
Labor in Cold War Hong Kong.” Amerasia Journal 47, no. 2 (2021): 188–207. https://
doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2021.2009419.
Chow, Rey. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2012.
———. Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading. 1st edition. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998.
———. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014.
Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke University
Press Books, 2003.
———. “It’s Not about Anything.” Social Text 32, no. 4 (2014): 125–34. https://doi.
org/10.1215/01642472-2820496.
———. The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man.” Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press Books, 2019.
Chuh, Kandice, and Karen Shimakawa. Orientations Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora.
First edition. E-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822381259.
David S Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A Niu. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative
Fiction, History, and Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Davis, Heather. Plastic Matter. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2022.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. 1 edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota
Press, 1992.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. Revised edition. New
York : Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press, 2008.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal beyond the Lim
its of Critique.” Philosophia (Albany, N.Y . ) 8, no. 1 (2018): 19–41. https://doi.
org/10.1353/phi.2018.0001.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “On Difference Without Separability,” January 1, 2018. https://www.
academia.edu/76961561/On_Difference_Without_Separability.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Edited
by Colin Gordon. 1st American Ed edition. New York: Vintage, 1980.
87
Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997.
Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Illustrated edi
tion. Durham ; London: Duke University Press Books, 2018.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Translated by
Erik Butler. London ; New York: Verso, 2017.
———. Saving Beauty. Translated by Daniel Steuer. 1st edition. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA:
Polity, 2017.
———. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Translated by Daniel Steuer.
1st edition. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity, 2020.
———. The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering. Translated by Daniel
Steuer. 1st edition. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity, 2017.
———. The Transparency Society. 1 edition. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2015.
Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. New York: One World, 2020.
Hong, Grace Kyungwon, and Roderick A. Ferguson, eds. Strange Affinities: The Gender and
Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Duke University Press Books, 2011.
Hoskins, Janet, and Trường Thanh Nguyẽ
̂ n. Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field.
Intersections. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016.
Huang, Michelle N. “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Journal of
Asian American Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 95–117. https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2017.0006.
Huang, Vivian L. Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability. Duke Uni
versity Press Books, 2022.
Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis, MN: eflux Architecture, 2021.
———. Recursivity and Contingency. London ; New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2019.
Irigaray, Luce. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Soci
ety 6, no. 1 (1980): 69–79. https://doi.org/10.1086/493777.
Kang, Hyun Yi. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002.
88
Kang, Laura Hyun Yi. Traffic in Asian Women. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2020.
Lai, Larissa. Iron Goddess of Mercy. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021.
Lim, Louisa. Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong . New York: Riverhead
Books, 2022.
Liu, Wen. “Narrating Against Assimilation and the Empire: Diasporic Mourning and Queer Asian
Melancholia.” Women’ s Studies Quarterly 47, no. 1 & 2 (2019): 176–92. https://doi.
org/10.1353/wsq.2019.0020.
Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. 1st edition. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2018.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University
Press Books, 1996.
———. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. https://doi.
org/10.1515/9780822375647.
Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience.
Minneapolis, UNITED STATES: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. D-Passage: The Digital Way. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2013.
———. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics. 1 edition.
New York: Routledge, 1991.
———. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Underlining/margin
Notes edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
Nevill, Alexander. Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography. 1st ed. 2021 edition. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2022.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
NBC News. “Opinion | Atlanta Suspect’s Excuses Spotlight America’s Sexualized Racism Prob
lem.” Accessed November 25, 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/atlanta-
spa-shooting-suspect-s-bad-day-defense-america-s-ncna1261362.
Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford, Ca
lif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Poppenhagen, Nicole, and Jens Temmen. “Across Currents: Connections between Atlantic and
(Trans)Pacific Studies.” Atlantic Studies (Abingdon, England) 15, no. 2 (2018): 149–59.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2017.1394131.
89
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University
Press Books, 2016.
———. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic
Liberalism - Journal #112 October 2020 - e-Flux.” Accessed November 25, 2022.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/112/352823/the-ancestral-present-of-oceanic-illu
sions-connected-and-differentiated-in-late-toxic-liberalism/.
Rhee, Margaret. “In Search of My Robot: Race, Technology, and the Asian American Body.”
S&F Online. Accessed February 22, 2019. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technol
ogies/margaret-rhee-in-search-of-my-robot-race-technology-and-the-asian-american-
body/.
Shimizu, Celine Parrenas. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on
Screen and Scene. Illustrated edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed.
London ; Zed Books, 2012.
Snorton, C. Riley, and Hentyle Yapp. Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value. Critical
Anthologies in Art and Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020.
Sylvia Wynter. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human,
After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR (East Lansing, Mich.) 3, no. 3
(2003): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics,
Praxis. Duke University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11g9616.
Yao, Xine. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America.
Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2021.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Worldizing data: embodiment, abstraction, and distortion in art-science praxis

PDF

From the extraordinary to the everyday: fan culture’s impact on the transition of Chinese post-cinema in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century

PDF

Poetic science: evoking wonder through transmedia discovery of science

PDF

Modular cinema: multi-screen aesthetics and recombinatorial narrative

PDF

Neuro-avantgarde

PDF

Somatic montage: supra-dimensional composition in cinema and the arts

PDF

Speculative Latinidades: imagining Latinx identities in science fiction and fantasy Media and activism

PDF

Machines of the un/real: mapping the passage between the virtual and the material in the attraction

PDF

Encounters with the Anthropocene: synthetic geologies, diegetic ecologies and other landscape imaginaries

PDF

Collectivizing justice: transmedia memory practices, participatory witnessing, and feminist space building in Nicaragua

PDF

Reality ends here: environmental game design and participatory spectacle

PDF

Dying to be: prefigurative performances of necrontology against neoliberal subjectivity

PDF

Inventing immersive journalism: embodiment, realism and presence in nonfiction

PDF

Media of the abstract: exploring axioms, techniques, and histories of procedural content generation

PDF

Last broadcast: making meaning out of the mundane

PDF

Garden designing a creative experience with art and music orchestra

PDF

Designing speculative rituals: tangible imaginaries and fictive practices from the (inter)personal to the political

PDF

Real fake rooms: experiments in narrative design for virtual reality

PDF

Re/locating new media in the museum

PDF

Infrastructures of the imagination: building new worlds in media, art, & design

Asset Metadata

Creator Lam, Fidelia (author)

Core Title Enigmatic form-finding

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 08/17/2024

Defense Date 12/08/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aesthetics,Asian/American,decolonial epistemologies,feminist media art,Hong Kong,multimedia,OAI-PMH Harvest,praxis

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kratky, Andreas (committee chair), Duong, Lan (committee member), Fisher, Scott (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Willis, Holly (committee member)

Creator Email fidelial@usc.edu,fideliaolam@gmail.com

Unique identifier UC112732982

Identifier etd-LamFidelia-11475.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-LamFidelia-11475

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Lam, Fidelia

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20230222-usctheses-batch-1007 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu