One Face on Thousands Postcards

2024

Watercolour and archival inkjet on washi paper (rice)

35 x43 inches, a set of 3

 

Postcards are porous photo-objects that traverse territories and socio-ideological borders. Text and image inform and distort one another.

 

I examined three identical postcards of San Francisco's Chinatown with shifting captions and colors. This recurring image evokes my visual research on Chinese female emigration from Hong Kong to America leading to a deeper research of Cantonese slave girls in the early 1900s. One postcard was initially captioned “Chinese slave-girl” and later re-captioned as “Chinese custom of carrying children,” with the background altered to a rose garden.

 

I reconstructed the girl's face with rice, treating each grain as a pixel to reclaim this racialized symbol. The material embodies the sorrow and resilience embedded in the rice agricultural traditions of Hong Kong and Southern China, where the girl originated. Over time, the rice starch naturally cracks and deforms, using the material’s transformation to critique her erasure through the proliferation and re-appropriation of itinerant images.