The core of identity in the United States forgets. The Assimilation process tells immigrants that the path of the least resistance is to smooth out their differences in imperial classifications.
“Just like an invisible disease, assimilation is at its best if it is not detectable,” writes Anne Anlin Cheng in her recent memoirs Ordinary disasters: how I stopped a model minority (Random House, 2024). “The sociologist Infure Goffman calls Assimilation about, the idea that you play or cover your differences to fit in with regular culture or expectation. Assimilation does not pass, it is more of a Shell game. The good assimilation, just like the good girl, sets a good face, makes herself a little smaller for the convenience of others, does everything that is needed to maintain the smooth surface of sociology. It is not because things are easier if you admit or just because you want to please, it is because what is on the other side of that courtesy is a violence that is so everyday and in -depth that your survival is at stake. “
That idea to cover or even discover that the opposite could indicate is the core of the current exhibition of Serena Chang, Fresh waterIn Island Gallery, exploring her father’s memories of working in a tights of Panty Factory in Taiwan. His memories of his youth on the island nation are displayed in the form of drawings of sugar cane and videos from a factory, often on top of each other. In the middle of this display is the namesake of the exhibition, a sugar cane ghost forest consisting of 60 stems that extend pure nude stockings over plastic and steel rod ranges. The suggestion of a field evokes the memory of a historical time and place, creating a product that was once ubiquitous for working women as a way to meet company standards, which encourages them to hide for decency.
Pantyhose is no longer necessary for most clothing codes, in particular in North America, because modes for delicate leggings have been completely rejected or tastes have changed to absorb more opaque materials. At the basis of each of these spooky forms are fragments of the Chinese characters ‘you’, ‘I’ and ‘us’. The word for ‘we’, 我們 我們, in Pinyin is spelled on wǒmen, and that is also included, as the artist plays with language and his translation, something that the underpass assimilation -fears, while we often run a line that show us , as immigrants, as immigrants, at the same time strange and/or known.
Smaller items that are displayed on the walls include packaging forms that are closed with images of stockings that they transform into a kind of camouflage and mask their utilitarian nature. The drawing of Chang’s father of a sugar cane forest changes the hint of a memory in another pattern, and we hear audio everywhere that suggests an extra type of pattern recognition, such as mixing insects and factory sounds. Auditory coverage is another example of conformity, while we hide our language rhythms and tones, as well as our geographical journeys, to prove to others that we are not like they are, anyone else, anyone else she maybe.
Listening to stories and understanding the memories of parents are obsessions of immigrant children in colonial societies of settlers. Perhaps this reminds us why we are here, what we have lost to make the journey, how we fit in or not. Above all, it anchors us in a society that does its utmost to forget what came earlier. The grass is often greener back thereAnd the water is probably also sweeter.
Serena Chang: fresh water will take place in Island Gallery (83 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan) up to and including 15 February. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
