Asian American History: Artifact as Art

The exhibit is a collection of artifacts reflecting Asian American history: trade cards from the late nineteenth century featuring an anti-Chinese political bias; a bumper sticker demonstrating the various forms of intolerance experienced by Vietnamese in the southern U.S. post Vietnam War; the Time magazine article “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs” published two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The exhibit was installed by Binh Danh, a Masters in Fine Arts candidate at Stanford. In 1979, Danh and his family became part of the great migration of Vietnamese Boat people who left the country after the fall of Saigon. This perilous journey was his parents’ hope for a better future and opportunity for their children.

“As I became interested in Asian American history, I learned as much as I could about it. It was as if I was making up for all the lost time in my childhood when I thought that I would naturally become white when I grew older. A few years ago, I came to feel that learning about this history was not enough; I wanted to own it. By collecting these artifacts, I began to understand that earlier generations of Asian Americans faced greater hardships than we do today. By bringing these artifacts to light, and thinking about the images critically, I wanted to pay homage to all of those who laid the path for us to walk on. This path that we continue to build may become the road that will lead us to the America for which we all continue to search. bell hooks sums up this mission best: our struggle is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Binh Danh

May 27, 2003

NPR's Ketzel Levine profiled Binh Danh on Tuesday, June 24th at 7:20am on KQED (FM 88.5). To hear the interview and view Binh’s chlorophyll prints (through a photosynthesis process he develops images from Vietnam onto leaves of plants) go to http://www.npr.org/programs/talkingplants/features/2003/danh/index.html