Artists’ talk
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 11th, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
VENUE: RedLine Contemporary Art Center/ 2350 Arapahoe Street, Denver CO 80205
Participating artists - Scott Tsuchitani, Sammy Lee, Yong Soon Min, Maryrose Mendoza
Saturday, September 11th, 11:00 AM at RedLine and on Zoom
PLEASE REGISTER to attend IN-PERSON or VIRTUALLY (via Zoom)
The Island, film screening
Saturday, September 11th, 12:00 PM, following artists’ talk
The Island by Tuan Andrew Nguyễn, 42 min
The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. My family and I were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991, when it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth—having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam—finds a United Nations scientist who has washed ashore after the world’s last nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, I question the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement.
Presented as part of inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE exhibition. The theme inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE captures the struggles of Asians and Asian Americans to survive and thrive in the face of strong anti-Asian sentiment. Asians and Asian Americans are alternately made invisible and hypervisible through stereotypes such as “model minorities,” “honorary whites,”“perpetual foreigners,” and “enemy aliens.” Yet, Asian America is remarkably complex due to cultural diversity, various migration routes, and different socioeconomic circumstances.
inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE will showcase Asian and Asian American artists, scholars, performers, and community organizers from different ethnic, gender, and geographic backgrounds.
Image courtesy of Scott Tsuchitani
