These staged black and white self-portrait photographs utilized traditional Asian theatrical and visual language to imitate and interpret Renaissance and Baroque paintings. . Assimulation is a tragicomedy focusing on race, sex, and gender, with respect to cultural assimilation. The finished prints are usually displayed as an installation that mimics museum tradition of exhibiting classical paintings using ornate frames and small metal tags that bear the work’s title.

AnOther Western began after the consideration for the immediate geographical, historical and cultural significance of the site to be an integral part of my the visual research. Although AnOther Western, which also deals with race and gender within the context of cultural assimilation, the project’s focus shifts from European High Culture to the American West. In this site-specific work, 19th century photographic syntax is utilized to reinterpret and to simulate tintype portraits made in the West during late 1800's. In these new self-portraits, the Asian immigrant take on new roles as gunslingers, musicians and gentlemen. By consciously assuming culturally powerful icons, and not the assumed stereotypical representations of Asian as the submissive other (i.e. opium addicts, domestic servants) AnOther Western intends to humorously and ironically question and challenge the legitimacy and authority of the western myth.

My work-in-progress also includes AnOther Expedition which I began in the summer of 1998 when I received a grant from the Lila Wallace and Readers Digest to live and work in Monet’s Garden in Giverny, France. AnOther Expedition is a simulated natural history museum installation of a fictitious Vietnamese colonial expedition to France. This installation includes approximately 600 Cyanotype prints of flora specimen as well as water, soil, and other physical elements that were collected from Monet's Garden. The intention is to subvert the historical European Gaze on Asia, to deconstruct the invention of photography as a colonial tool, and finally to question the authority and validity of Western cultural institutional practices.

I started working on Two Million Steps in the spring of 2001 during my first visit to Vietnam since 1975. This on going body of work is a series of large color photographs documenting my site-specific performances in Vietnam as a ‘boat person.’ Two Million Steps is an investigation of cultural displacement within both contexts of immigration and emigration. The title itself refers to the physical distance between the shores of Vietnam and the United States, metaphorically it is the liminal space that exists between the two cultures.

East of Eden presents a series of large, staged, color, narrative photographs that question the historical depiction of the American landscape as the Garden of Eden. East of Eden constitutes a complete shift in my focus from autobiographical and post-colonial discourse to the universal fear The historical strategy of utilizing the landscape as a metaphor for nationalism and optimism provides the background for my visual thesis. I am interested in looking at our contemporary American landscape as the Garden of Eden and re-framing it from the post-September 11th perspective. East of Eden deals with humanity in the context of the post-apocalyptic landscape. However, the project’s intentions are not limited to the portrayal of death and despair but also to the portrayal of hope and regeneration. In 2005, I will travel throughout Vietnam and continue working on East of Eden both in a landscape that bears the physical scars of war, and with the people that have lived and survived its horrors. With East of Eden I am seeking an answer to the question: how does humanity endure and nurture despite the distractions and horror that often times exist to destroy it?

The Garden is a collection of large color photographs documenting a series of abandoned greenhouses located approximately 45 minutes from Oberlin, Ohio. I hope to photograph these abandoned structures to chart the various stages of growth and decay throughout the year. Aesthetically, The Garden is a departure from my other work. With this new project, I am trying to objectively documenting rather then to subjectively staging. In The Garden I use the camera to record facts rather then to use it as a subjective tool . Conceptually, this body of work is similar to another work in progress entitled East Of Eden. Metaphorically. The Garden is an inquiry into the Garden of Eden as an abandoned site. As if from the perspective of a natural scientist or archeologist, I have become increasingly intrigued with the idea of the abandoned greenhouses as a future relic of a man-made Garden of Eden. Beyond serving as metaphorical landscape, I hope that my images from The Garden will also serve as a document of a vanishing part of Ohio’s unique history.