How to Make a Golden State, 2022 — 2023. 116” x 60.5”. Image transfer, ink and mixed media drawing. Image transfer, ink, rice paper and mixed media drawing. Installation view at the Berkeley Art Center (Berkeley, CA). Photography by Connie Zheng.
How to Make a Golden State is a map that traces Asian farmworker history in California and links it to the broader geopolitical forces driving agricultural development in the U.S. The map is densely populated with a blend of media-media paper collage paintings of archival photographs, geological maps, and anecdotes describing Chinese, Japanese, Filipinx, Korean, South Asian, and Southeast Asian farmworkers’ crucial contributions to the development of agriculture in the Golden State. Consisting of multiple semi-translucent layers of imagery, this work aims to evoke a history painting set in an ecosystem alive with feeling, where history inhabits the space of myth, and vice versa. While the map finds its anchor in Asian farmworker history in California, it inhabits a dispersed and palimpsestic sense of time that threads the past through the present and aims to visualize the ways in which the history of Asian agricultural labor in California is tightly braided with environmental history, labor history, economic history, political history, and immigration history in not just the Golden State, but the U.S. as a whole.
More detail images, as well as a risograph print version, forthcoming.