A River Once Dreamed

In A River Once Dreamed, I recompose the Hudson River School’s romanticized paintings of the river valley by staging scenes of Asian American men casted along the Hudson. Each constructed scene - while challenging the iconography of the American landscape - recontextualizes the relationship between nature and belonging, identity and masculinity, and history and erasure. Inspired by my time documenting Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta, I came to realize the misrepresented and invisible histories of Asian migrants on American land. The national landscape - as depicted in American history and in the paintings of the Hudson River School - has signified a collective and imagined cultural identity that dictated the terms of belonging. Despite my father’s pledge of allegiance in the Gulf War, and the labor of Asian immigrants who constructed railroads and advanced the nation’s agricultural infrastructure, Asian Americans are displaced from the visual tableau of national identity. Through intimate scenes of friendship, the casted subjects are reimagined as cultural citizens of America’s first iconic landscape, the Hudson River Valley, and are ultimately reclaiming and contesting the history of land ownership, power, and their stake in the American pastoral.