Asia Society exhibit on the immigrant experience carries weight
Liu’s solemn and poetic installation “Each and Every/ Houston” lingers in the brain well after a visitor has left Asia Society Texas Center. Its massive scale may have something to do with that, but the piece’s elements pose questions with no clear answers.
Situated in a middle gallery of the four-person exhibition “Making Home: Artists and Immigration,” Liu’s piece has a dramatic focal point: a monochromatic sea of hundreds of articles of children’s clothing — onesies, frilly little dresses, T-shirts, pants, socks and baby booties that she has individually coated in cement and laid out over the floor underneath a heavy “rain” of concrete-dipped cotton thread.
A native of China who lives in Austin and teaches at the University of Texas, Liu created “Each and Every” in 2019 as a response to the United States’ family separation and zerotolerance policies that separated thousands of children from their parents at the country’s southern border during the Trump administration.
A master at choosing materials that respond to her installation sites, she had dipped thousands of white feathers in tar as part of an earlier immigration themed project. She conceived “Each and Every” for a Seattle art space with exposed brick walls, and the mortar between the bricks inspired her use of cement. The result is literally heavy. Importantly, though, the clothes don’t sit on the floor. They appear to hover, caught in a liminal space.
Within the clean, smooth and bright walls of the Asia Society, the first thing I noticed about the cement is how lifeless it looks. Each element of clothing could be a headstone in a crowded cemetery.
Problems involving immigrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border persist, but because they haven’t been at the top of the news cycle recently, I also thought it could be a memorial to dead families in Ukraine. On a gentler note, Liu was preserving memories as well: She started the project with a pile of her daughter’s used clothes. No doubt, parents who have watched their babies grow up and out of cute outfits can relate.
And what of that “rain” of threads dangling from the ceiling? Does it imply human tears? Is it about lives hanging by a thread? And why do the thin lines stop a few inches shy of the clothes? Could the threads also be rising like vapor, rather than descending? However one reads it, the gap between the threads and hardened clothes leaves a palpable ache.
Liu also performs a silent meditation with “Each and Every,” using a small table at the front of the room where a pile of used children’s clothing awaits. On June 18, she will be there with a needle and thread, mending the worn clothes. The point is to display what she calls “the redemptive, healing process of feminine labor,” but it’s also an act of political proBeili test and a reenactment of personal history. Liu lived in China until she was 4, in a home where repairing clothes was a necessity and a time-honored tradition.
The show’s other three artists also have lived as immigrants or are the children of immigrants. Curator Bridget Bray, who recently moved on after a long stint at the center, deftly devoted a room to each of them. The result is a show that covers a lot of ground without overwhelming.
Phung Huynh’s prints and drawings on flattened pink doughnut boxes allude to family histories as well as economies; 90 percent of doughnut shops in California are run by Cambodian immigrants or Khamericans (Cambodian Americans). Her cross-stitched depictions of personalized California license plates with un-Anglicized names suggest the yearning to assimilate and belong.
Amanda Phing bod hip ak ki ya’ s room bring san emotive blast of color. She has painted a mural on the back wall with the message “Find Hope Here.”
That sentiment offers a middle ground between the celebratory spirit of her eye-popping foundobject constructions and the nostalgia of pantry goods and other small objects from an Asian American home. The artist’s written poems, presented on walls and video monitors, heighten the mood.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s fourchannel video installation “The Specter of Ancestors Becoming” imagines conversations between several uneasy generations of a Vietnamese community in Senegal. They’re descendants of the tirailleurs sénégalais, West African colonial soldiers who were among the French forces sent to combat Vietnamese liberation uprisings in the 1940s. I wasn’t familiar with that history, and Nguyen gives a compelling voice (or voices) to it.
On the way out, I was asked to jot down what I’d learned and post it to a bulletin board. Obviously, it wouldn’t all fit. But testament to the show’s thoughtfulness, the board was already full, and layered.