Artist Statement

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Image by Hernease Davis at Visual Studies Workshop Project Residency

When a beam of bright light hits the convex and polished surface, an image is reflected back onto the wall. This is a description of a magic mirror, an object from the Han Dynasty and one that is synonymous with how Euro-America views China: both technically advanced and shrouded in mystery. This term also points to the history of photography, a term used in the Victorian era to describe a camera. The images from a camera depicting a reality all too familiar and unfamiliar.

Like magic mirrors, my work uses GIFs, photography, sculptures, new media, and installation to generate mirror images that trouble the long history of public spectacle and display of Chinese American women and femme bodies. My magic mirrors generate a world that prioritizes queer modes of joy, humor and play as an act of resistance against assimilation into the hegemony of American culture. The lighting studio becomes a stage for drag performances that question patriarchal norms of gender through moments of failure. My assemblages and sculptures reference historical and current Chinese diasporic objects as a method of reimagining connections to my ancestral roots.

Drawing from my mother’s flawed knowledge regarding ancestral rituals, I obstruct depictions of my body through repetitive visual systems, and the jittery loops of video. The altars that frame the images reference survival tactics and resourcefulness of my family. The missing moments (or missing frames) in a GIF function the same way traditions do: morphing over time and over generations through repetition and loss. I project the GIFs of my body onto the reflective surfaces of my sculptures to multiply my image across the space, creating ephemeral and ghostly afterimages, a pervasive haunting of the many versions of my body. The images of offerings transmute into performative gestures informed by drag aesthetics. Through absurdity, I create offerings that examine the ways migration of flora breaches boundaries and borders in ways bodies cannot as a way to challenge the colonial violence within history of European tableau and still life paintings.

The gestures, the hovering hands in pantyhose and fake nails on the back of heels expose the monstrosity of Eurocentric control. Yet in fragmented spaces where queer rituals and inherited memories regenerate, the gestures and rituals become interventions that reject the pressure to fit into heteronormative ideas of gender and societal beauty standards. Instead, my work invites you into an alternate world that glimmers, sweats, and seeps as offerings are consumed and refilled.

Jamie Ho

offerings

magic mirrors

Orchid Sisters

Canton Gulf

Goat Town