An installation by Nuttaphol Ma
What is a migrant if not a traveler, a nomad, a wanderer? Nuttaphol Ma, an alumni fellow at the Santa Fe Art Institute, has been engaged in a continuous journey since 2011, when he began his project The China
Outpost, which he describes as “a nomadic sweatshop of one.” What Ma, who is of Chinese ethnicity but was raised in Thailand and the United States, produces in The
China Outpost are threads made from discarded plastic bags. He intends to use the thread as the core building material for the reconstruction of his ancestral, rural Chinese home, which he visited long ago as a student in Hong Kong.
SFAI (1600 St. Michael’s Drive, 505-424-5050) presents Walk With Me, an installation based on Ma’s migratory trek along California State Route 190 from Badwater Basin in Death Valley to Whitney Portal, the gateway to the highest peak in the contiguous United States: Mount Whitney. The exhibition includes relics, artifacts, and photographs from The China Outpost project, a model of the ancestral home of Ma’s great-grandfather, and a handcrafted wall of fabric onto which he projects a video of his long walk along the highway.
Walk With Me opens on Friday, Aug. 24, with a reception at 5 p.m. and is on view through Sept. 14. Join Ma for a talk and brown-bag lunch at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 12, when he will discuss San Francisco’s Angel Island, site of the Angel Island Immigration Station, and Shamian Island in China’s Guangdong Province — and how they relate to Ma’s future direction for The China Outpost. His talk is titled “Work-in-Progress: How do I begin to talk about the spatial injustices that rest beneath the kindred sites of Angel Island and Shamian Island?” On Thursday, Aug. 30, SFAI shows a series of Ma’s short films including
Born by the River (2013), inspired by a late-19th-century photograph of an unknown Chinese laborer at the historic Harmony Borax Works, a mining operation in Death Valley. The 28-minute film questions why a plaque at the site honors the operation’s owners but not the laborers. Also showing are the films Shitpipe Explosion @ The China Outpost (2012), A Grain of Rice Under a Microscope (2013), The China Outpost > on the road @ Union Station (2014), and other shorts that explore themes of invisible labor and contested sites. “Invisible labor goes unseen, unheard and those who put in the labor repeat the task over and over again,” Ma writes. “It is an arduous conditioning of the mind to stomach the pace, the rhythm. It is heroic because collectively these unspoken tasks are the voiceless blood and tears of our socio-economic landscape.” The screenings start at 7:30 p.m. — Michael Abatemarco