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Posts Tagged: race

THE HISTORY HOUSE

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The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.

-Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

I created this piece as part of a racial justice poster project. When coming up with ideas for the design, I knew that I wanted to create something that speaks to and pays tribute to the personal, internal growth from which movements for justice are born.

In the 23 years of my little life, I’ve been blessed to have walked alongside crazy cool people with wild, contradictory, profound stories. What I’ve gathered is that we’ve all come to understand and work for racial justice in different ways. Sometimes they mesh, other times they clash. At the same time, activism is changing. In this age of information, good PR is reality, something that every powerful institution is utilizing with deadening precision. Glossy commodified justice is circulated and consumed, while everyday struggles are left unreported, ridiculed, or tokenized.

For me at this point in time, this means taking it back to basics. Even as an artist, it would be stupid to think that one poster I make or even a lifetime of work could herald a movement or a better world. There are too many creative and dedicated people out there for it to be that easy. What I can do is share the things that have affected and inspired me: to learn, to be a better person, to do more for the people I know and would like to know.

I really like this quote by José Rizal cos it sums up something so simple yet easy to forget:

He who does not know how to look back at the place from which he came will never arrive at his destination.

Or in everyday speak:

No history, no self. Know history, know self.

This has been a root and guiding principle in my own life. It’s also been a sort of restorative when shit gets complicated or overwhelming. I like to think that racial justice isn’t a fight but a part of who I am. This piece is an effort to visualize the natural and restorative core of racial justice: a retreat into the elements, the mind, and one’s own trek through life.

But enough with the cheese! To show my appreciation for the zombies stoners good people who visit my bloggy, I am giving away a few prints. Yes yes… free stuff!! They are full-color digital prints (17 x 11″) via Autumn Express in San Francisco. Just email me at dnm.choi (at) gmail (dot) com and mention the blog, we’ll talk.

But you can wake up younger under the knife

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Haitian Girl by David Choe. A limited number of prints are for sale online, with all proceeds going to Yele Haiti, Wyclef Jean’s foundation.

I have a hard time writing in here about things that are truly important… or tragic and incomprehensible to me. I feel like unless my talk is backed up by substantive action, it trivializes the very cause it supposedly stands by. Hence the disproportionate amount of tongue-in-cheekery and not much of anything else.

So this is why I really appreciate writers who take the time to thoughtfully analyze difficult subjects and attempt to bridge that gap between theory and reality. Catherine Traywick of Hyphen has a great blog series called Idealize This!, which discusses practical issues encountered by people working for change. The latest is on photography and relief, specifically in Haiti — something that I’ve (less articulately) pondered.

She writes:

In the aftermath of the earthquake that decimated Port-au-Prince weeks ago, journalists have worked ’round the clock to keep the flickering screens and hungry eyes of their eager public perpetually engaged. And we, in turn, have consumed, without pause, photo essay upon photo essay of devastated Haitians climbing bloody out from under piles of debris, desperate Haitians knocking over little boys, and homeless Haitians sleeping without shelter, among many other startling images captured by news photographers with Pulitzer-sized dreams (after all, Haiti’s last disaster earned this guy one!).

And we are so moved by these terrible, suspended fragments of another’s life that it may not occur to us that the bloody woman we saw rising from beneath blocks of concrete probably saw a photographer’s lens before she saw the faces of her rescuers. Nor do we wonder whether she’ll get a dime if her photo wins him any awards.

But that’s nothing new. Photojournalism has always been an ethically shady enterprise. Whether Steve McCurry’s portrait of the reluctantly compliant “Afghan Girl” or Kevin Carter’s voyeuristic photo of a starving Sudanese baby, the trade has long borne a paradoxical reputation; while widely regarded as a public service, it nevertheless entails a level of detachment that is antithetical to most conventional conceptions of “service.” It’s a topic I’ve written about before, and one that I continually revisit, particularly as I get to know more photographers and especially as I strive to critique the ethical implications of my own journalistic projects.

She goes on to detail the work of orgs like PhotoPhilanthropy, which positions ethical photojournalism as a process rather than just an outcome.

And in the end, there’s no perfect formula for photographers or artists to both serve others and receive recognition for their work. It’s a personal, situational issue that requires, at the very least, a whole lot of self-reflection. Just finding out that the answer is that there is no answer is a struggle in itself.

As Eliza Gregory of PhotoPhilanthropy writes, “I think great art surprises us—it can come from anywhere, and be about anything. So I don’t think you have to be from a community to chronicle it with beauty and subtlety. But, it’s also very easy to become a hapless messiah, a benevolent imperialist, or simply someone who is not actually helping anyone. “

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22
Dec 09

Big city yum yums

Vendor Power is a project by artist/designer Candy Chang, made in collaboration with The Street Vendor Project and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). This guide to street vending in NYC decodes the city’s cryptic volume of regulations through a series of illustrations. Rosten Woo from CUP notes, “we tried to create something that uses as little language as possible to spell out the most critical pieces of the code.”

Many vendors are being fined $1000 for little things like parking their cart too far away from the curb, not “conspicuously” wearing their vending license, and other rules buried in the City’s regulation book full of intimidating jargon that would make even the most patient person cry. This guide helps clarify the rules through diagrams and minimal text in English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish, so NYC’s diverse vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living.

Vendor Power is part of a series called Making Policy Public, which uses graphic design to explore and explain public policy. This is the beauty of design: a marriage of art and community needs. Thousands of copies were distributed to vendors this spring. Check out the research-and-design process via Urban Omnibus and click on the image above to download the poster.

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11
Dec 09

I hate the city but I love the city.

If there’s one movie worth seeing while you’re holed up indoors for the holidays, this one’s it.

Medicine for Melancholy is directed by Barry Jenkins, who also brought us this lovely short. It’s the story of Micah and ‘Jo: 2 twenty-something black folks in SF. And I specify “black” cos in my humble opinion, this film offers complex, subtle, and truthful expressions of what it means to be a person of color in the Bay Area nowadays. Intonations of race and class, indie and gentrification, nostalgia and attraction– unfold along the steep chilly beauty of San Francisco.

I first heard about the film after stumbling upon Chinaka Hodge’s review (which is worth reading in it’s entirety, btw). Since I’m not a poet by any means, I’ll let her do some convincing:

Medicine for Melancholy is worth owning because you’re in it. I swear. Me too. This is the first time that I’ve seen an image of someone like me on film, and not in the simple representational TV One sort of way. Not like how my chest swells a bit when Jada takes a good role. And that feeling is nice, don’t get me wrong, satisfying. But what’s at work here is a different kind of sorcery. Micah and Jo are two of the most complex black characters I’ve seen on screen. I’m intentional about qualifying them as black characters because I think the genius of the film is the pronunciation of how spectacular and mundane it is to be a twenty something person of color, in our age and geographic area. Micah and Jo are the people I chills with: reserved and brooding, hilarious under our breath, telling jokes about Carter G. Woodson on the way to indy shows.

I mean, if you know me, you know that I’m all about my Saturday afternoon Blackbusters, but what a special, charmed thing to see a film bereft of absentee fathers, great debates, spelling bees, basketball teams and princely robes. Micah and Jo don’t do that much on screen — in a way that makes me feel vindicated, because if the routines of Jerry and Elaine and Vince and Turtle and Rachel and Ross are entertaining and important, why not the kinds of isht we go through? Aren’t our subtle tensions and conversations at the toll booth and clumsy mornings-after the types of human interactions that change audiences, even in the slightest?

Oh yea, and the cinematography is effin’ beautiful. Check it out.

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25
Nov 09

[Linkage] The weekend is here and its only Wednesday.

This video is TIGHT! Makes me love Oakland (more than I already do, that is). Lifted from Oakland Local, a community news source that is fast becoming one of my personal faves.

I HATE STUPID SHITS

As for the photo, I was coming across way too many of these to ignore it any longer! See the ugly original (or don’t). For more on dumb shits pretending to make art off of the backs tits of their superiors: here, here, and here.

The fight for public education in CA is heating up. With strikes/occupations on campuses up and down the state– UCLA, CCSF, SF State, UCSC, UC Davis, CSU Fresno, Berkeley, and the UCOP office– plus a massive letter-writing campaign, statewide action planned for March 4, and a broad coalition of workers, students and faculty…. well, I’d be a little nervous if I was an administrator. There is some hope in the world!

Did you know it could be easy (maybe even fun) to track policy and government spending? I sure didn’t, until I came across this listing of government transparency projects that work to make data accessible to us.

Radical queer activists team up to fight hate crime legislation. Yasmin Nair details the work against “enhanced sentencing” and asks: “Is jailing people for their prejudice really going to curtail bigotry and prejudice? Or will it just end up policing thought and filling the coffers of the prison industrial complex?”

There was an Asian American blogger convening in LA last weekend, and apparently it was packed with drama. I feel sad that I missed out on the excitement… but in all seriousness, it sounds like a lot of good people interested in seeing change. Gotta start somewhere. Plus honesty goes a long way.

OH SHITS it’s a four-day weekend!!!! For the occasion, words of wisdom shared by my sister-from-another-mother :)

“eta Thanksgiving nah, ora nesay” – it’s not Thanksgiving when they took everything.”