SPCUNY Artist
Betty Yu
We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril
“We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril” is a public participatory multimedia storytelling project featuring outdoor projections and a geo-located audio walking tour highlighting how today’s anti-Asian violence can be traced back to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The project illustrates the impact it continues to have on the Asian immigrant labor experience.
Drawing from my years of experience as a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a successful multimedia installation artist, filmmaker, and activist I will launch “We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril”, a multimedia storytelling project featuring an interactive website with video and photography; a GPS-triggered audio walking tour, and outdoor evening projections. The project invites Asians-Americans to reclaim, and reassert our own Chinese immigrant and labor narratives through the telling of our ancestors’ stories, while reflecting on the current state of anti-Asian xenophobia.
In the wake of the deaths of multiple Asian women massage workers in Georgia on March 16th 2021, the American public has suddenly turned their focus to the rise of anti-Asian violence. This racialized and gendered violence didn’t just start with the pandemic.The public project invites Asians-Americans to participate in reclaiming, and reasserting our own Chinese immigrant, ancestral and labor narratives through the telling of our stories while reflecting on the current state of anti-Asian xenophobia.
I initially launched this project with storytelling events in Flushing, Queens from April to June 2021. These recorded stories, images and art were incorporated into a free outdoor projection/screening in Chinese, Korean and English on June 27th in Flushing.
I would continue to hold cultural and story gathering events to document people’s stories, along with their family photographs, ephemera, artifacts and other heirlooms. Through video or audio-only interviews – community members are invited to share stories about their ancestors’ immigrant or labor experiences; or share their own reflections about today’s rise in anti-Asian violence. These events would take place in Manhattan’s and Sunset Park Brooklyn’s Chinatowns as well as satellite Chinese immigrant communities in Queens.
This project is rooted in the sharing of my own story. My great grandfather, grandfather and parent’s migration and labor story is a first hand testimonial of the history of this racial discrimination. My great grandfather came in the mid-late 1800’s to Reno, Nevada as a laborer. White supremacists literally chased them away with crowbars destroying the small Chinatowns they had built. My grandfather came in the late 1920’s buying false papers. He was able to operate a small family owned Chinese hand laundry. He later went on to co-found the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, one of the first Chinese labor organizations in the U.S. in 1933.
I will collaborate with participants to record their stories through video, audio, photography and their own archives. Our stories are diverse, from Chinese laborers building the Transcontinental Railroads to operating hand laundries to working in the underground economy in order to survive. Through my active relationships with groups like Coast to Coast Chinatowns Against Displacement (C2C), CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, 18Million Rising, Chinatown Art Brigade, Wing on Wo’s WOW Project, the former ILGWU Garment Union, and others – I will engage an intergenerational group of storytellers. Through this collaboration with Chinese elders, community leaders, activists and cultural bearers, “We Were Here” provides a portal for the reclamation of our own stories. It celebrates community resilience and harkens back to the painful history of Chinese exclusion when Chinese were the first “illegal” workers, legally barred from U.S. citizenship for over 60 years.
The interactive website will allow visitors to experience a rich memory bank of stories told through interviews, home movies, family photographs, artifacts, ephemera, and audio. Visitors will also be able to contribute their own stories via the web portal. The GPS-triggered audio walking tour invites place-based visitors to walk through Chinatowns in NYC to unlock labor stories of the past and present. The outdoor evening projection will illuminate these rich undertold labor stories.
These stories would culminate into evening projections and an audio walking tour launching in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022.
"We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril"
Introduction, BronxNet News Segment and Excerpt of Screening Reel. Click here to watch the video (opens in new window).
The project is a platform that invites Chinese-Americans to contribute their own family photographs, ephemera, traditional artifacts, archival material, stories and voices that defy yellow peril while reclaiming our collective identity. My great-grandfather tried to build roots as an immigrant in Nevada in the 1860’s, only to be chased away by racist white laborers. It’s painful to confront our pasts. This project utilizes the power of collective storytelling, generational survival and creative resistance as medicine. In this time of heightened Anti-Asian xenophobia, collective reflection is needed.
In the face of continuous attacks on Asian Americans, racial justice uprisings and the Movement for Black Lives, there has never been a more critical moment for artists like me to connect to audiences through our work and deepen our impact. I continue to challenge myself and to push the boundaries of how art can truly help shift the nation’s consciousness and change hearts and minds. As a Chinese-American myself, I hope this project is engaging and thought-provoking, but also inspiring to other Asian Americans and viewers – to reflect on their own role in society and see themselves as agents of change. I hope the overall project encourages and emboldens the Asian-American community to speak out against anti-Asian racism as well as support broader racial justice movements.
Programs
Parts of the project can be encountered at the spring exhibition of the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, in/stasis.
