One Face on Thousands Postcards
2024–2025
rice-constructed photograph, watercolor and inkjet pigment on mulberry silk, 1900s postcards, rice starch and pigment on wire mesh, aluminum sheets, light bulbs
Silk: 35 x43 inches, a set of 3
One Face on Thousands Postcards (2024–25) uses three postcards as a lens to investigate power dynamics in image production and the construction of the “other.” By tracing the successive alterations of re-coloring and re-captioning an identical portrait, the work sheds light on the veiled history of Mui Tsai—Cantonese girls who were sold as servants from the port of Hong Kong to San Francisco in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its subsequent alterations prompted a visual inquiry into these changes. The project investigates the mobility of image and immobility of class, tracing the geopolitical immigration history of early Chinese Cantonese communities in America.
My research began with the Canton Girl portrait, a hand-painted photograph in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection. The museum's description focuses solely on the technical reproduction of the portrait as an economical keepsake, ignoring its historical context and the identity of its subject. Confronted with both the presence and absence of information in institutional archives, I found myself using eBay as an expanded archive to open up alternative narratives.
I use rice, both a highly racialized symbol and a core tenet in Cantonese history, as a central material to trace the history of image production and reproduction. In a photograph from the American Museum of Natural History, one captures a smiling Chinese man holding a bowl of rice and chopsticks. I reclaim its symbolism, reducing each grain of rice to an invisible unit, a “rice pixel” in the portrait that traces the sorrows and scars of women’s migration. In the late 19th Century, a high percentage of girls from the Canton region sailed across the Pacific Ocean to be sold and consumed as “human commodities” in San Francisco. Known as Mui Tsai, or “little sisters,” they were adopted by families but lived as enslaved workers. At 18, many were resold into brothels as prostitutes, confined behind barred windows.
Here, rice forms a fragile “screen.” Over time, as the rice starch naturally cracks, as does the image. The face hovers between visibility and erasure, with each fracture revealing a new violent history. Through the rice screen, I reclaim the commodified figure’s face. Her sharp gaze pierces back through time, confronting her oppressed past.
