Project Ideas

I want to ask my parents questions and record them (audio) and maybe my sister too. I want to cut together an audio track based on their responses--cutting and pasting, etc. Couple it with a visual backdrop, maybe my own slam poetry interspersed with it? I think the biggest question I want to ask is "where are we now? How did we get here?"

I feel so American right now, and I'm not sure how my parents feel, or my sister. I'm not quite in touch with my Asian heritage--it's always been there, but it's not a big part of who I am, just who my parents are. I want to talk about the spanning-across-the-oceans concept, that we always call the Philippines "home" (as in "going home"), but I've never lived there. My sister and I don't speak anything but English.

I want it to be a complete sensual experience, a work of performance art that melds different disciplines, because I feel like that's what growing up as an Asian American is really about.

In terms of Maya Lin, I'm inspired by her idea of memorializing people, not necessarily events. There's the idea of taking something aesthetically and making it into something that's really pure emotion.

I like that she's motivated by the personal side of history. That's what I want to focus on--the story of the people that made up events.

My parents were in Detroit in the 1980s. The racial tension they experienced (as Asian Americans in a very Anti-Japanese era/place) was so extreme. I grew up in the South.

You see things change and transform. I think my project has to be about transforming from one thing to another and back, half-way meeting up at points. It has to be multimedia, it has to have at least two different aspects to it--just like Maya Lin's memorial to Civil Rights. If this is going to be a memorial to how things have changed, it has to have some form of perpetual, kinetic change in it.

I think it's all about a collection of experiences that make a whole lifetime and future lifetime. It's not static, and it's not something that can be experienced fully by one person. It's about how different things and people interact. What they become. Chemical reactions and emotional counterpoints.