photography

This thesis addresses the personal lived memories and dominant historical narratives surrounding the incarceration of Japanese Americans in American concentration camps during World War II. Through the concepts of postmemory, performative gesturing, archives, and narratives the marginalization, erasure, and forgetting of the individual and social memories of the Japanese American incarceration that has taken place within American history and contemporary American society is explored. For the visual component of this thesis an archive of imagery that consists of contemporary landscape photographs of the physical remains of the American concentration camps, portraits of family members that were either incarcerated or are affected by its legacy, and family photographs and documents was created. These were presented in the form of a photobook and archival inkjet prints. This thesis project serves as an act of postmemory and Japanese American self-representation that considers the present state of the knowledge and understanding of the Japanese American incarceration and attempts to perpetuate its memory into the future.

This thesis attempts to analyze the effects of my father's job as an investigator of violent crime on himself and our family life. Using a wide range of mediums, the thesis work creates an anecdotal on-going investigation, examining family history and deconstructing conventional perceptions of domesticity and the home. A mix of photographs, furniture remnants and objects blend into a life-size cabinet of curiosities. The displaced objects mimic a home that has been dismantled for the viewer to inspect. By selecting and arranging objects and images, I created an ectopic visual narrative much like Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan's Evidence book, highlighting a mixture of the somber and strange in visual information with little context. Among this mixture of work is a strong theme of removal and misperception. Examining and reconstructing familiar objects from the home places importance on individual perception, challenging the viewer to inspect what has been removed and what has been left behind.

This thesis project explores the experience of pain and concealing pain, specifically pain caused by chronic migraine as well as its effect on a person's physiological and psychological state, the cloudy understanding of pain itself socially and within the medical community, and how these, in turn, affect each other. I use the lens of my own experiences with pain to explore it, not as a separate entity tacked onto an individual's personality, but as an ever-changing fluid part of the body and sense of self.Inspired by biological textbooks, medical scans, and surgical photography, my work is part-documentary, part-amateur scientific investigation, part-personal narrative. In much the same way a scientific study takes the form of many different experiments, I investigate through photography (in book form), installation, and painting the experience of feeling and living with painthe objective of which is to present a multi-faceted aesthetic experience for the viewer and to explore how different modes of creation promote different ways of understanding.

This thesis suggests a template for the artist-in-community as described by African American novelist Toni Morrison; presents an approach to space/place in light of both white Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan's assertions about the effects of media on human experience and African American social theorist Patricia Hill Collin's description of safe-spaces as used by Black women in the United States; places my work in conversation with the work of established contemporary artists whose claimed identities, similar to my own, place them at the margins of American society to, as Latino artist Félix González Torres said, "(open) up the terms of the argument, and (re-address) the issue of quality and who dictates and defines 'quality'"; and posits that, given their missions, relationships with their communities, and my personal experiences with them, libraries and library-like spaces are metaphors and appropriate places for my work to enter into the community-based conversations that drive my practice.

This thesis recorded the two years works I have done in the MFA program. I explored the using of colors, forms and the meaning of making things. We can appreciate both large and small aspects of nature (both the oceans and the grains of sand), I look at design both from the overall big picture and each minute detail. I chose poster as my main medium of expression because it is the most straightforward. The main three parts of my works is the mid-term review, the library exhibition and the thesis exhibition. I made several different works to challenge the possibilities and the deepness of design. I also worked in professional design studio as GTA job, so both sides can be improved for me as a designer. In the future, I will keep developing my voice in art and design world.