Perilous Times in Four Texts
Silk screen on cotton silk voile, sound, speakers
Voice over in collaboration with Ngọc Loan Trần
60” x 84”
2017

In 1973, three young Asian American activists recorded A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America, an album of folk songs that told stories immigrant workers and solidarity with African American and Latin American freedom movements. Using the liner notes from this album as a starting point, this installation traces the revolutionary idealism marked by this album to claim a historical presence in today’s fraught racial climate.

Audio narration excerpted from A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America (1973) by Chris Kando Iijima, Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto, and William “Charlie” Chin; Black Skin, White Masks (1952) by Frantz Fanon, Discourse on Colonialism (1950) by Aimé Césaire; and A Letter from #DefendDurham Arrestees to the Movement (2017) by Ngọc Loan Trần,Takiyah Thompson, Aaron Alexander Caldwell, Raul Mauro Arce Jimenez, Elena Everett, Taylor Alexander Jun Cook, Dante Emmanuel Strobino, and Peter Gull Gilbert