Ontological Portrait / Self-Portrait. Black and White Photographs, 2003. First contest of Emerging Artists, Costa Rica, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica, 2003.
My work is based on self-reference. As a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants I have faced several cultural juxtaposition processes. For a long time I have incorporated cliché elements of the oriental imagery (particularly the Chinese imagery), inserting them in a typical Costa Rican scenarios, and achieving small exchanges in clothing or food that accentuate the superficial manner in which the hybridization issue is dealt with.
In this piece I’ve tried to abandon the previous baroque stand point to shift the attention on the mutation process that the piece refers to. My family education has been permeated by the paradigm of my Grandfather (victim of Chiang Kai-Shek’s national campaign). The fact of being born in Costa Rica forces me to confront Taiwan from a westernized education, nevertheless we have maintained our language and aesthetic heritage intact. The transaction in this case is ‘apparently’ simple: transforming myself into my Grandfather, defines an attitude of historical conscience, but at the same time the weight that this repre- sents to the immigrant, who have to ‘exaggerate’ their representative means to be considered.
I’m using a personal reference, my physical resemblance to my Grandfather, to deal with the immigrant’s question and Chinese mi- gration in particular, which has been subjected to totalitarian politi- cal processes and an unassumed resistance from the West. There is a search for roots in people we don’t know, who grew and lived in a context that is completely different.
The use of black and white is due to the documentary sense that I would like to transmit with the photographs.