Fall 2025
Letter from the Editors
Second Year Crew: Sarah Luu, Gwen Hoeffgen, Domenic Toliver and Adela Cardona Puerta
One of the things that consistently stands out in our program is how our work is informed by those we surround ourselves by. Each of us comes with a different set of experiences, questions, and personal connections, and those differences shape our practices in ways that make them unmistakably our own. At the same time, we often find ourselves drawn together through shared experiences, interests, and processes.
This issue brings together interviews that follow those threads: the ideas we return to, the places that ground us, and the people who walk beside us. For some, literature became a site of connection—reading as a way of relating to others, or books as companions that open unexpected routes into our work. Others found themselves seeking alternative modes of expression, experimenting with forms that offer new possibilities for communication and understanding. Many contributors reflected on learning through lived experience, letting life itself act as a teacher.
Across several interviews, we also see a reconsideration of the tools we rely on. How can the same tool take on different purposes depending on intention, context, or care? Many conversations touched on the importance of praxis, the effort to align what we practice with what we believe, and to walk the walk and not only talk the talk. Themes of inner awareness, vulnerability, and the willingness to be misunderstood recur as well, along with honest reflections on anger as a meaningful way of navigating the world. These interviews invite us into alternative ways of sensing, thinking, and interpreting what surrounds us.
One of the most prominent themes this term is friendship. Many contributors chose to speak with friends, collaborators, or peers—people who have been present in their lives not only as fellow artists but as confidants and supporters. These conversations highlight what it means to show up for one another, to share resources and experiences, and to grow alongside someone else. The issue reveals how friendships, both longstanding and newly formed, can shape creative practices just as profoundly as any formal study.
Each term, this journal gives us an opportunity to reflect on our practices through the act of conversation. Interviewing—listening, responding, wondering aloud—offers its own form of discovery. While patterns inevitably emerge across issues, each interview remains distinct: its own world, its own rhythm, its own exchange.
We hope you enjoy this fall’s issue of the Social Forms of Art Journal.
Teaching a Painting
Simeen Anjum with Tamia Alston-Ward
“The fact that you can’t read it all forces you to want to read what’s in there… There are creative ways you can educate about Black historical subjects which are being erased from our curriculums. Art is a wonderful gateway into educating people on not only contemporary, but historical, political situations and environments.”
During my summer internship in Adult Education at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, I found myself drawn to the dynamic conversations happening just next door at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where an educator institute was underway. It was there that I met Tamia, a gallery educator. I was struck by Tamia’s ability to cultivate an atmosphere of curiosity and critical engagement during gallery sessions, creating space for young learners to explore art in meaningful and thought-provoking ways. As someone exploring museum education across different institutions, I’ve been interested in how various museums approach learning in their spaces, what supports meaningful engagement and what insights I can bring into my own practice.
In this interview, I speak with Tamia about her role as a K–12 educator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the challenges and opportunities of working in museum education today, and what it means to teach art in a city as historically rich and complex as Philadelphia. We also delve into the work of Philadelphia-born artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose painting, The Annunciation, offers a historically grounded and deeply human take on a biblical scene, an entry point for considering how museums can foster more accurate, inclusive narratives.
At a time when public education is facing increasing censorship through restrictions on teaching about race, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues, museums may serve as critical spaces for dialogue and reflection. How can they support more honest, expansive conversations about history and identity? Tamia shares insight into the power and responsibility of museum educators to engage students in this important work.
Simeen Anjum: What is your favorite painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) that you like to talk about as a gallery educator?
Tamia Alston-Ward: I would say the Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner. I have a connection to the artist through the alma mater (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).
Simeen: Is it the one he painted in Palestine?
Tamia: Yes. I love this painting and I still teach it over and over again. And what’s cool is that it’s opposite another Annunciation painting from the Baroque era by the Spanish artist Zurbarán. It’s a great contrast and shows the differences in how the story of Mary, Jesus’ mother, is depicted across time. Tanner’s is from 1898. Zurbarán’s is from 1650.
What I love most about the painting is the expression of Mary. Tanner was really focused on historical and biblical accuracy. There are so many depictions of Mary, in the museum and around the world, but none quite like this one. He traveled to Palestine to study the architecture and the people because that’s where Mary and Jesus were from. There’s a long history of Black Christian presence here in Philadelphia that Tanner and his family were part of. His father was a bishop and the family published hymnals for churches.
Henry Ossawa Tanner: The Annunciation (1898)
But what I really love is how Tanner shows Mary in a way that I wish everyone could see. All the other versions of Mary just aren’t accurate. You can see the realism in her expression. She looks concerned. In the Bible, when Gabriel tells her that she’s been chosen, there’s a moment where she accepts it. And the expression on her face here makes it seem like she’s still in that moment, still figuring it out. She is not yet wearing the colors blue and red that symbolize her role. You don’t have to believe in Christianity to appreciate that these were real people from a real part of the world, a part of the world that’s currently experiencing real hurt, pain, and hardship through genocide. We forget that the religious figures we revere came from that area.
If I were to go online right now and search “Annunciation,” there would be so many images and almost all of them would show a much older Mary, a much whiter Mary. The architecture would be European, the curtains, the setting, the clothing, it’s all inaccurate.
The Zurbarán painting is across from it, so we do a compare and contrast activity. I’ll bring the visitors to both and use a Venn diagram. We talk about composition—Mary is on the right, Gabriel on the left, in both. But we also look at architecture, clothing—“Do you think they wore this 2,000 years ago in Palestine?” The answer is no. Definitely not. So when I show students these paintings, I ask them: After seeing this and the Zurbarán version—which one feels more accurate? And they always point to Tanner’s.
Francisco de Zurbarán: The Annunciation (1650)
All this is to say that art helps us discuss political and social issues, both from the past and today. Zurbarán’s painting is from 1650, after the medieval period when all art had to be religious. The Baroque era was dramatic and theatrical, artists were showing off their skills with drapery, perspective, etc. And the paintings were meant to depict the Bible for people who couldn’t read. But Tanner had the opportunity to travel. He made this painting in Paris, after studying at PAFA and trying to escape racism in the U.S. And you can see how that experience shaped his work, his faith, his clarity, his honesty. I think he made that painting for himself.
Simeen: I’m curious about how the Museum Educator role differs from the Docent role, and in what ways these positions overlap or collaborate. I’ve noticed that many museums are moving away from traditional docent models and shifting toward more learner-centered approaches to engaging with art, rather than strictly information-based methods.
Tamia: The docents work on a volunteer basis. And as educators, we’re constantly looking at work like, “Okay, how do we talk about different artworks to students? How do we talk about nudity?” etc. We have discussions on how to best go about teaching in the galleries. We also create the teaching resources and plan how objects of different cultural backgrounds should be taught about.
Simeen: I feel that traditional docent-led tours often don’t require deep critical engagement with the collection; they tend to focus more on familiarizing visitors with what’s on display. But museums are increasingly reconsidering how valuable it is to simply present the history of an artwork versus helping visitors actively engage with it, especially when working with visiting student groups.
Tamia: Yeah, a lot of people who come to the museum are first time visitors, so we do a lot of highlights tours and it kind of lends itself to sameness. But the museum has been making an effort to make sure docents receive training from the educators. And they’ve done some of our K–12 tours for us, and they have great relationships with us and the students. But there was a time when an object was taught that was different from what we wanted it to be taught. It was a piece by Barbara Walker. She’s a draftsperson and she makes these drawings where one person is primarily drawn and the other is embossed.
From left to right: Seeing through Time, Titus Kaphar; Vanishing Point 24 (Mingard). Credits: Héloïse Le Fourner
So this painting right here is Titus Kaphar, and this drawing right here is Barbara Walker, and they were situated in the gallery opposite each other, so they were facing one another. They are both referencing the same artwork, a European piece by Pierre Mignard of a woman. And you can kind of barely see her in one, and then she’s cut out in the other artwork. And we see only the girl who was enslaved.
We discussed amongst educators: are we going to show the students the image that both of these artists are referencing? And we decided not to. The reason being that both of these artists intentionally cut out this European woman from these images—they’re both referencing the same image, but they are both removing, intentionally, the European image. It was in the section of the exhibition called ‘Past and Present’, it was a section dedicated to reclaiming history, basically, and contextualizing history in a different way.
So, I think one of the educators noticed that one of the docents had brought the laptop to the exhibition just to be able to show the Mignard piece to the visitors.And when we heard about that, we rolled our eyes. But again, it’s really up to the educator’s discretion if they want to do whatever they want to do on a tour. They really insisted on showing the image. And I think the main kind of discussion around these pieces was: why do we insist on showing the white figure?
Why do we need to see it, when we already can assume what she looks like based on just the outline here, this embossing and the clothes.
If you just go to the third floor of the museum, you’ll see a lot of Regency, aristocratic European figures everywhere. And the real reason why we didn’t want to show these is because this girl here is enslaved. This is a picture of a woman who is a duchess who had a painting by Pierre Mignard commissioned for her, and it was depicting her with her arm around this enslaved person. When we interpret it to the kids, we ask them close-looking questions: “What do you see?” “What do you notice?” A lot of the time, they’ll say ‘some mom and her kid’ or if it’s not a mother, then maybe it’s a sister. Because of the nature of the way the images are arranged, it makes the students think that the relationship between these two figures is tender.
But it also allows for a conversation around propagandistic imagery of the “benevolent slave owner” imagery. In the 1700s it would have looked like a really pretty, beautiful painting. But was that relationship really what it is in the painting? No, because this person was owned. And it’s another reason why we would not show the image of the woman because it’s not about her. Barbara Walker, in her drawing, makes an effort to render only the things that are relevant such as this little girl here. And Titus Kaphar in her artwork manipulates the canvas to physically cut out the woman. And then he puts a painting of another canvas inside, depicting the woman, in a way that you can’t tell who she is. So a lot of times in the galleries when we ask students “Who do you think she is?” Most of them reply with, “Maybe it’s the little girl grown up,” “Maybe it’s her mother,” “Her actual mother.”
Simeen: I am sure a lot of great discussions come from this. Has there been any other artworks lately that have allowed for more critical engagement within the museum?
Tamia: Yes, this work from Brand X, a screen printing collective based in New York. And it is a piece depicting an African sculpture superimposed on an open book, that is oriented vertically, but you can see both the pages. It’s from a speech made by Malcolm X called ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’. My colleague, Cherish and I chose that image because we thought it would be great for teachers to understand that they can use this as a jumping-off point to talk about things that may be frowned upon by their administration. and then imposed over it, you have this African sculpture taken from 1970s “primitive” African works. And there’s no context, there’s really not much there that the artist, in the description, is telling you about the works. But there’s a lot that you can interpret from there. You can think about censorship, because you can’t see all of Malcolm X’s words. The fact that you can’t read it all forces you to want to read what’s in there. I think for students, it’s a great gateway for them to learn about many things. Learn about African objects, and why they are without context in certain spaces, anthropological context, but not in a formal or spiritual context. It makes you think about why there would be an African object mixed in with Malcolm X’s words, what is that connection? You could ask that to the students and have them research about Malcolm X as a historical figure, and this piece as an artwork. What I really enjoy about that piece, is that there are creative ways you can educate about Black historical subjects which are being erased from our curriculums. Art is a wonderful gateway into educating people on not only contemporary, but historical, political situations and environments.
Adam Pendleton: Untitled (Figure and Malcolm), 2020
Simeen Anjum (she/her) is an artist and educator based in Portland. In her practice, she explores new ways of fostering solidarity and community in response to the late-capitalist world that often isolates us. Her projects take many forms, including sunset-watching gatherings, resting spaces in malls, and singing circles in unexpected locations. She is also interested in learning and engagement within museums and art spaces. She has explored this through internships at several institutions, including the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Partition Museum in New Delhi, and the Littman and White Galleries at Portland State University. She currently works as a K–12 Learning Guide at the Portland Art Museum
Tamia Alston-Ward is an artist and educator based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in research and the study of material culture in the Black Diaspora. She has worked as an educator in the National Liberty Museum, Malcolm Jenkins Foundation and currently serves as the Art Speaks Coordinator and Museum educator in Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Stories & Melodies in the School in the Sky
Domenic Toliver in Conversation with Frank Cobb, Meta 4(Sadie), Duane (Casper) and Gwen Hoeffgen
“Truth is, we aren’t out to hurt you, you act like we’re hurting you when you’re really hurting us.’”
I’ve always believed the best moments in my work happen when I’m not trying to make anything at all, when people just start talking and the room shifts. This is just a piece of that from a day at Street Roots doing our weekly photography hangouts with Frank, Duane, Joan, Sadie and everyone drifting in and out. That day Gwen and I were there to help folks make photo books with photos taken in previous hangouts. The books quickly became secondary to the stories: a harmonica origin story no one will ever know the truth of, Spider-Man facts, bad puns and poetry. I chose this conversation because it captures exactly what I love about the work. The way people build meaning together without even noticing, the way laughter and memory and small disagreements become their own kind of art. The way they move through the workshop, joking, disagreeing, teaching each other, improvising, it all reflects the knowledge they carry with them. It reminds me why I keep showing up: not just for the photos, but for the people who bring them to life, and quite frankly that’s it.
Interlude: Spur of the moment– Frank whipped out a harmonica from his jacket pocket, a childish smirk on his face, he shut his eyes tight and began to play. For all I know he played an original tune, not as easy as Roadhouse Blues but a simple melody that froze the room. What follows is a snippet of that afternoon, unedited, a little messy, and exactly what it felt like.
Frank: (harmonica)
Gwen: Wow!
Dom: Oh wait, you gotta do one more riff. I have to take a picture.
Frank: (harmonica, same tune)
Dom: You’re really good, how’d you learn to play?
Duane: Yeah yeah, it’s only because I taught him how to play it.
Frank: Tell them the real story of how that shit happened, man. Just keep it real. We were down at the –
Duane: We were down at City Hall. We were doing a camp out at City Hall. And I broke out my harmonica and started playing, and he was like, “Man, I’d like to learn how to play like that.” So I told him I’d teach him, make him a pro… What? Say it didn’t happen like that?
Frank: That’s so bullshit. The first time I ever picked up a harmonica, ever-
Duane: Was at City Hall!
Frank: It was at City Hall, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing and-
Duane: I know and I taught you how to play!
Frank: I wanted to play and so I just started fucking playing, I just tried and it sounded like that. Just started playing like this right off the bat. Really, and I didn’t think it sounded good at all.
Dom: What?
Gwen: Really?
Frank: I kid you not, I thought I sounded stupid.
Gwen: That’s actually unbelievable!
Frank: I thought I sounded so stupid. I really did, I was like “Oh I’m done with this, it’s bad. I’m usually good at everything.”
Dom: Were they telling you that you were good?
Frank: Everyone kept trying to tell me, “You sound great, you sound amazing!” Even this guy *points to Duane*
He kept telling me to play. I was like, “Ehh nah I’m not good at it.”
Dom: So he just picked it up and started playing like that, that’s impressive.
Duane: He’s such a liar. Bullshit. He knows I taught him how to play.
Frank: I’m not making it up, you going to beat me up with your strong hand? Look out baby, hold me back.
Duane: He just doesn’t want to give up our secrets, I taught him.
Frank: That was a while ago. I’ve known you longer than I’ve been working at Street Roots, Duane. That’s crazy. Since fucking greenhouse.
Duane: I know. That’s insanity. And as long as you tried to get me to work here with you. You did try for almost twenty years!
Frank: Yeah. Damn. I would tell him every day: “Come on dude, just come work.” And he’d be like, “Nah, next time”
Duane: All it took was the right look, and you didn’t have it, Frank.
Dom: Ouch.
Sadie: Are we supposed to be working on our covers?
Gwen: You guys could do your cover or write in your books, it’s up to you.
Sadie: I think I want to do my cover with no binding.
Gwen: Oh you want to keep it how it is, we can hole punch it and tie it with string?
Sadie: I like that. Let’s do that.
Gwen: Okay, so I can do two holes on the side. And then you can choose a string and tie it together. I did it like this, I folded these two over, and then cut it barely, and then you have to get the double-sided tape right on the edge.
Frank: That looks cool.
Dom: It could look cool if you decorate both sides too.
Sadie: I want to make sure I get it right in my book, I suffer from not paying attention sometimes, your names are Gwen and Dom right?
Frank: Yeah Gwen and Dom, Gwen like Spider-Man.
Gwen: Yup.
Frank: Are you a Spider-Man fan? Gwen Stacy. Is a Spider-Man character.
Dom: Oh yeah, she is a Spider-Man character.
Frank: That’s how I remember the name Gwen, Gwen Stacy from Spider-man, maybe that’ll help.
Gwen: Or like Gwen Stefani.
Sadie: Gwen Stefani, yeah. I like that more. I’m like— Gwen Stacy? I’ve never heard of this person.
Frank: You’re like “Who the fuck is Gwen Stacy?” I guess I’m a—I’m a nerd. Yeah, I’m a nerd. But how do y’all not know Gwen Stacy. She was Spider-Man’s first love. Before what’s her name?
Gwen: Mary-Jane?
Frank: Yes, Mary-Jane
Dom: Isn’t Gwen Stacy the one that fell?
Frank: Ahh yeah she did.
Gwen: Wait, what happened to her?
Dom: You never read the story or seen the movie?
Gwen: No.
Frank: His first love and she knows he’s Spider-Man. She’s always caught in the middle of his fights. Okay, so one time, she falls from a building. Snaps her neck or something, or hits her head.
Dom: He saves her almost though right?
Frank: He almost does. His web reaches her, but she still dies.
Sadie: She should’ve aimed for the bushes.
Frank: Wow, shut up (laughs)
Duane: Am I able to put some poetry in this. I have a poem but I can’t write it.
Gwen: Yes of course, I can maybe write it in there for you.
Duane: Okay, record this.
Dom: It’s still recording.
Duane: So we’re talking about the experience of the poor and the rich. As I’m asking them if they want to buy a paper so we can support ourselves and feed ourselves, they don’t realize we’re the working class just like them. They look at us like we’re nothing, they walk around us scared to death of what we’re not going to do to them. It doesn’t hurt me like it hurts others because I’ve experienced so much of it in my life, being poor and homeless and in need a lot of the time. Broken, walking, or so. Truth is, we aren’t out to hurt you, you act like we’re hurting you when you’re really hurting us.
Gwen: That was good, yeah I can write that in your book.
Duane: Could you also do five covers for my books? I got five poetry books.
Gwen: I can’t today just ’cause we’re not gonna have time. But maybe next week we can start on that project?
Duane: Wait, oh I gotta go. What time is it?
Gwen: It’s 1:10.
Duane: Oh, I’m late.
Gwen: You’re late? Okay. Come back next week and hopefully we will have your photos by then. Fingers crossed.
Duane: Okay. You said it’s 1:08? Oh man, I’m late. Oh, Frank’s fault again.
Frank: It’s always Frank’s fault.
Duane: Yeah, just like Frank. Making me late. It’s okay. Frankly, frankly.
Frank: Frankly— frankly it’s okay.
Dom: Be frank he has to go, Frank.
Duane: Oh just Frank saying, Frankly saying Frank. Can I be frank with you right now, Frank?
Is that a frank hotdog?
Gwen: A frank dog?
Duane: Just wanna be frank with you right now.
Sadie: Lets stop.
Gwen: Yes please.
Dom: Oh I got a feeling you’re late everywhere you go, Duane.
Duane: Hi, you can call me Late
Gwen: Bye Duane. Have a good week.
Duane: I will. Bye.
Domenic Toliver is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across film, photography, performance, and socially engaged art. His practice emerges through dialogue, where responding to people, what’s said and unsaid, becomes a creative act in itself. He approaches his work as an ongoing process of questioning rather than seeking fixed answers, embracing change as both material and method. For him, life itself is a form of art—fluid, participatory, and relational.
Frank, Sadie, and Duane are Street Roots vendors and Artists that frequent a weekly photography/art workshop to collaborate with my partner Gwen Hoeffgen and I at the Streets Roots. Their works span poetry, photography, performance, drawing, and much more. Their photos and stories were presented and exhibited at Blue Sky Gallery for the December 2025 Community art wall showcase.
Gwen Hoeffgen is a visual and social practice artist who currently investigates the physicality of emotional experiences, and how those experiences live within the body waiting to be released. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in psychology, she worked as a social worker in the mental health, addiction, and cognitive health fields, and then received her MA in Drawing at Paris College of Art. Currently, as an Art and Social Practice MFA student at Portland State University, she use mediums of painting, drawing, photography, sound, and conversation to explore how we find stories within pieces, creases, breaks, and bends.
Feeling Very Vietnamese Tonight
Text by Sarah Ngọc Lưu with Sean Xuân Hiếu Nguyễn
“I just remember walking into a restaurant and seeing that as one of their beverage options, and was like, ‘Wait, are we drinking this?’ I was gagged.” 𑁋Sean Nguyễn
Sean and I first met through Interact, a high-school service club sponsored by Rotary International. Even though we lived in different cities, we became good friends as we regularly crossed paths since our high schools fell under the same 5150 district. Over the years, we graduated, went to college, and took off to start our lives. We first reconnected after running into each other at a HorsegiirL show in San Francisco over a year ago. My best friend, Alan, bumped into his ex-roommate on the floor who just so happened to be Sean’s partner (which I had no clue). When Alan and Sean’s partner saw each other, they screamed. When Sean and I recognized each other, we screamed. And then the four of us screamed together.
After such a fateful night at the club, we followed up with each other, discovering our shared love for a documentary about the Vietnamese-American New Wave scene and realizing two things: we were both pursuing graduate degrees and our themes of research were incredibly similar. With our curiosities aligned, we spent some time chatting over the phone. Reflecting on our thoughts and shared experiences, we reimagined alternative ways our collective histories can be remembered and how our legacy can transgress inherited traumas.
Sean Nguyễn: I think the last time that we talked, there were a whole slew of combinations that just made me feel like I wasn’t stable in my research. Where I am now is still slightly unclear, but I’ve moved myself into a more interdisciplinary approach. I’m trying to think about Vietnamese American storytelling in this particular way where we’re departing from the Vietnamese American literary canon that has been set up by authors like Việt Thanh Nguyễn and Ocean Vương.
These people who were making that be their work were being produced in some type of accommodationist white market. I think particularly why the Ocean Vương books did so successfully was because it really allowed white people to self-flagellate themselves and induce white guilt.
Sarah Lưu: How so?
Sean: I think now we’ve surpassed this really interesting period between 2018 and 2021 of just like pure unadulterated wokeness. I’m wondering how we move on from here where there’s movement outside of identity politics into something more critical?
Sarah: Is there anything you might be looking into that you feel brings a more critical sense beyond identity politics?
Sean: I just finished this book called Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyễn. The way that it’s written borrows from the history of Japanese American incarceration camps. Basically it’s about a series of terrorist attacks in the United States, seven bombings in different airports. The assailants are Vietnamese, and that triggers an executive order that puts all Vietnamese Americans into mass detention.
It’s in the perspective of these four half siblings. Because their father left several families, he now just has this cohort of half siblings and they kind of know each other. So he reinvents another set of contemporary displacement to think and exercise how we might reexamine Vietnamese American trauma, how we endure it, and how we could resist it without necessarily having to reinvoke the Vietnamese American refugee narrative.
Sarah: Which in many ways, is what we’re both thinking about now, too. We’re just both wondering what our “how” is.
And I definitely agree about those works appealing to a white audience in some ways. My first impression of Ocean Vương’s work was that it was beautifully written from a Vietnamese experience, but it didn’t particularly feel like it was for a Vietnamese audience. It didn’t feel like it was written for me.
Sean: I’ve been thinking, there’s a significance of family archives in Vietnamese American storytelling. Oftentimes family archives or family histories are the loci of how a Vietnamese American writer would want to approach storytelling, even if not for it being the main part of the story. It’s how one gets findings and the research to start writing.
There’s this idea of the second-generation Vietnamese American storyteller whose writings are incredibly distinct from that of the 1.5 generation* who hold direct experience of the war and can recall their own personal memories and/or the lack of it. Second-generation writers have it a bit more complex because they have to draw from different sources, but also hold a responsibility to acknowledge the distance between generations and their disconnection from the war.
*1.5 Generation: Those who were born in Vietnam but immigrated to the U.S. as children due to the American War.
Sarah: How does this responsibility affect the way we evolve? What are some of the implications it might have on how the second generation sees itself?
Sean: Hmm. Maybe responsibility isn’t the right word because I feel it makes it sound like a burden that we haven’t experienced the war, but it does complicate our identities in the way that our direct history has to do with state-sanctioned trauma. It’s more of asking ourselves, “How do we continue to acknowledge and critique the war without having to always resurface the terrible?”
Sarah: Which is literally what I’ve been asking myself in my own research. As a child, anytime I wanted to learn something about our people’s history in America, I would see our people subjected to pain. They’re hiding, running, or lifeless. They’re in tears, faces filled with fear, desperation and uncertainty. I always felt like there could be more beyond the suffering. Wanting to know more about our ancestors’ history in the land we were born in just shouldn’t solely lead others like myself to the terrible and graphic.
Sean: I would love to point you in a theoretical direction. It really helped me think differently about my own thesis. What you’re talking about is so resonant with a concept I read about by Ly Thuy Nguyen called “Queer Dis/inheritance” where she essentially completely rejects the inheritance of her family’s trauma.
Sarah: Wait… I’ve never even thought about that at all. To me, it was always a part of us.
Sean: There’s talk about this sort of silence, one that’s provoked or even intentional between us and the 1.5 generation. There’s this Vietnamese-American artist, Trinh Mai, who made an installation called, “We Should Be Heirs”, where she displays unopened letters from her grandma. The unopened letter represents that collective silence and that takes shape in many ways. Keeping these letters unopened, holding her grandma’s secrets, tends to the gendered violences from the Vietnam war, like the way masculinity in the community has been handled differently in the refugee narrative.
Sarah: How does addressing the silence by leaning into it change the way we think about these gaps of silence, intentional or not, between generations?
Sean: Well, part of the ethos in Trinh Mai’s installation is that there is a contextual gap between her and the viewer, who maybe doesn’t know much about the Vietnam War. She’s not trying to set her work up as an educational activity, but rather just wanting to address the silence that’s between her and her grandma. In doing so, she recognizes her grandmother’s dignity that had been soiled in the process of displacement, being displaced, and then being racialized in the United States. I think that is a really generous and critical understanding of how we can think about the gap between us and the 1.5 generation, or the first generation, maybe.
Sarah: Wow. I love that approach. And I’m well familiar with Trinh Mai! I was able to hear her speak about her practice at an art lecture during my undergrad and she was the first artist whose work made me cry. That unintentional/intentional silence on war experiences is something I actually didn’t experience much of. My mother was very vocal about my family’s experiences, and was always sharing the photographs she had brought with her on boat. It’s led me to think constantly about others that might’ve done the same, and so I’m curious what you think. How does a family’s archive change when it crosses an ocean?
Sean: Wow… hmm. The crossing of oceans gives us an element in which the archive had been produced haphazardly, a byproduct of this really large imperial violent activity. If we were to think about your family’s collection of photographs being collected within the sense of urgency, then that already gives it so much more meaning.
I was TA-ing for a class yesterday, and we’re talking about this author named Karen Tei Yamashita, and she is this really awesome Japanese American writer. In one of her talks, she was addressing the question, “What does a home for Asian Americans look like?” She talks about this home as an imagined condition, represented by the crossing of oceans. That transnational part cannot be missed about how we think about archives, migration, and movement over the water.
Sarah: I completely agree. Our archives are so special because there are roots planted in multiple points around the world. And maybe that affects how our families have chosen to plant their roots here in the states. I imagine that every Vietnamese immigrant household is a reflection of the places they’ve been. The things that are collected, repaired and treasured… that in itself is an archive of its own . It’s a shame that many second-generation folks only describe it as “hoarding”. I feel like there’s much more to that. What do you think?
Sean: Well, the hoarding is like a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder for sure. When I think of hoarding in our community, I think about how displacement has conditioned lots of Vietnamese refugees to collect. It really can go both ways where if you lose your home first, you might be conditioned to think that nothing of yours is ever going to be permanent again. Conversely, if you were to lose your home in a very serious way, you might be conditioned to believe that you should build your nest with anything you can keep your hands on to affirm yourself that your home is here, represented by these objects. The sense of permanence is represented by how much stuff you have in your home.
Sarah: This idea of accumulating as many things as you can to make sure that it’s permanent…That kind of parallels these personal family archives that traveled across the sea. How many things can I accumulate in my go bag? What can I take with me to preserve these memories I have of home? What is most important about the life we are forced to leave behind?
Sean: I think also another important element of these archives is, how do these objects tell a story when they’re all put in context with each other?
Sarah: That New Wave book is a great example to answer that question. I mean, when I shared that book with my aunts for the first time they screamed when they skimmed the pages. If those stories and photos were shared separately and not in that sort of “New Wave” container, they might’ve not associated it with New Wave music, but just a reflection of life for them in the 80s. But together, they saw a community carved out for themselves by themselves, clinging onto music to heal.
Sean: Which is why I think it’s so special because it has a postcustodial, living archive element when you think about it in a kind of meta way. It already has a really different perspective about the Vietnamese American lived experience through the practice of its archival research being sourced from different families across the states and all across the global diaspora. Collecting photos from several diasporas broadens the scope of it, and orienting its touring theater screenings within our community ties it all together as something that is living and breathing. It isn’t just static in its presentation or as something to be watched, but something to be handled.
Sarah: Definitely, oh my gosh. The first time I went to watch it was through the CAAM Festival at SFMOMA last May. I brought my mom because the Ruth Asawa show was happening at the same time. We saw the book first and thought it was going to be on the more lighthearted side, with all the glitz and glamour. When we left the screening room, our faces were wet and puffed red. During our CalTrain ride back home, we just talked the entire hour and a half. My mom was bringing up new stories I had never heard before. To see a documentary have so much reactionary power, I was in awe. It was deeply activating our personal repositories of memories.
Sean: Exactly, and the documentary wasn’t pulling things that we were never aware of. The things that were discussed were things we grew up watching, too. The documentary generates this drive to inquire critically about your heritage. The reason why we didn’t inquire about it is because we never understood it in the form of a story before. Otherwise, it would’ve been a pretty conventional and unassuming part of our lives, just something that our parents used to listen to. Because of Elizabeth Ai being able to turn it into a story, something to be moved by, it allows us to think more critically about our own history.
Sarah: I’ve been asking myself that, like what’s my story? What’s this narrative that my research could uncover? Elizabeth found a story in our relationship to music. I’ve been exploring our culture’s food and cooking.
Sean: Have you ever seen your mom make thịt kho? The caramelized meat and eggs?
Sarah: Yes!
Sean: Does she use the coconut drink*?
Sarah: Yes, she does.
*Ahh yes…the coconut drink. Coco Rico soda might just be a nice carbonated beverage to you, but to many Vietnamese immigrants, it’s solely for cooking, and the key ingredient to making your meat tender for thịt kho.
Sean: She does! Okay, because recently I went to this restaurant in San Francisco called Parada 22 and they sell the drink, you know, to drink. I was so taken aback by it because I’ve never questioned its ability to be… drunk. I just always thought it was a cooking ingredient because that’s only how I ever saw it.
Sarah: Me too! My mom would have so many of those coconut soda cans stacked underneath our kitchen table.
Sean: Exactly, it was just like MSG or nước mắm––another cooking ingredient. But anyway, I just remember walking into a restaurant and seeing that as one of their beverage options and was like, “Wait, are we drinking this?” I was gagged. How did that come to be? Has it always been a tradition?
It makes me think, if we were to assume that it isn’t a traditional thing and that it might’ve come from the sorting of resources for our moms to be thinking about that ingredient in the same way.
Sarah: Maybe there was a network of recipe exchanging that we might’ve been unaware of.
Sean: Those recipes must have been orated in a way where they were passed through communities through word-of-mouth. I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen our recipes being written down. That’s never something my mom did, and if she did, it was really rare. Maybe for stuff like banana bread, you know?
Sarah: Yeah, my mom was the same way. I remember asking her how she learned to cook and if there were recipes my grandma shared with her. She told me there were no recipes, just my grandma. Nothing was written down, it was all recollected in memory, passed down from one matriarch to another. I’[m always wondering which of those memories are the oldest.
Sean: When I think about the passing of family recipes, I think a lot about what dictates a mother to make the decision to teach those to their children. For my mom, she’s been particularly hesitant to hand them over because I believe there’s a certain part of her that thinks she can still cook for me. There’s a bit of a power resistance going on where the passing down of recipes to me will lead to a lessened reliance on my mother to make them for me. It’s almost like, if I were to ask her for a recipe, she’d be like, “Okay, so you’d rather I die.”
Sarah: Okay, your mom is hilarious. Love her. But it’s quite interesting isn’t it? My mom isn’t really the same way, but she’s a heavy criticizer. Both of us are huge foodies and we love going out to eat. Whether it’s a new trendy spot or the tried-and-true phở restaurant close to home, she’ll always say at the end of the meal that she could 1000% make it better. And she knows exactly what ingredient it might be missing.
And again, I’ve asked her how she learned these skills and all of the recipes she’s cooked meals for me from. She said my grandma. There was no book to read or notes to take. My grandma would just be with her in the kitchen telling her what to do until my mom remembered it all by memory.
Sean: These unspoken customs make me think to put it in a larger context. We have a certain responsibility when we’re researching critical refugee studies and diaspora studies. How do we discern a Vietnamese American diasporic tradition that maybe would distinguish themselves from other communities who have been affected by displacement? What is the Vietnamese American response? What were the conditions that allowed us to think about things in a particular way than how a Chinese American or Mexican American would approach these questions of passing down family recipes or engaging in their own archives?
Sarah: I had a really great discussion with my directed studies advisor, Dr. Kiara Hill, whose work is rooted in the African diaspora. I was feeling lost with where to even start with such a grand topic, and she told me, “The seeds are in the mundane.” Thinking specifically about that, the simple ways we wake up, share meals, rest, work, and play… Observing our day-to-day habits could hold potential to show us what the Vietnamese experience is.
Sean: And resistance, especially when we’re thinking about the maintenance of memories; there’s a practice of certain memories we choose to keep and throw away for the sake of self-preservation. Something that you might benefit from is looking at Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory. She poses a lot of the questions we’ve been thinking about, which is how do we keep refugee traditions or practices in our memory without having to retell the horrors when it’s not necessary? Are we bringing up something that we don’t want to? What are the conditions of the baggage that comes up whenever we talk about the Vietnam War? Even though she’s writing it from a Holocaust perspective, the same mechanism of recalling memories from war, violence, and genocide are one and the same.
Sarah: The maintenance of memory sounds very alive. So what if memories are all that makes an archive? Could a person exist to be an archive in their own body? Memories stay as long as they live in others and I’m intrigued by the idea that an archive has a living heartbeat. When I think about archives, I think cream boxes on dusty shelves. I don’t want that to be how our histories are preserved and that being our legacy.
Sean: We’re kind of trapped in time with how we’re represented at the moment. Even so, writers like Việt Thanh Nguyễn and Ocean Vương are quite responsible for really breaking the Vietnamese American stories into the general market for refugee storytelling, so when they tell their perspectives as refugees, it’s really what they know best and what’s most earnest to them. But that being reiterated is somewhat of a problem too.
Sarah: It is definitely possible to have a revisitation of the trauma in a way that isn’t reimagining the experience and expanding the pain.
Something I’m curious about is the disconnect between us (Việt Kiều*) and the Vietnamese people back home. I’ve never been to Vietnam, but I hear that how we think of the war and the way it circulates in conversation is different. I wonder if that also applies to the way they address their war-related trauma, too.
*Việt Kiều: Term for describing those of Vietnamese descent living abroad.
Sean: Oh yeah, absolutely. When we think about how the Vietnam War was such an epic event in the American historical canon of empire, it was a huge ordeal… this holy interventionist thing. And then the whole humanitarian part of it is such an ingrained part of our American history. But in Vietnam, it’s one of many in their many years of colonial history; they treat it almost as if it was a footnote. Their entire history is predated on colonization, so in some ways colonization is part of their national identity and sense of nationalism.
Sarah: How did you learn about that?
Sean: It was expressed to me when I went to Vietnam earlier this year. I stopped by this risograph studio in Ho Chi Minh City called “We Do Good”, mostly because I wanted to take a look. But I was picking their brain a little bit about Vietnamese history and how Vietnamese youth are thinking about these things.
They deal with a lot of censorship and there’s a lot of criticism about the government, but not a lot is done or said about it. It’s just a conversational practice. For Vietnamese youth, they’re very apolitical about everything. When I asked them about what they’re making art about, it’s all about the personal, individual, and the family. Almost nothing has to do with politics. Bringing that into a larger context of history that isn’t visible, it was really hard for them to gain political support in expressing solidarity through encampments or protests because it wasn’t embedded in their culture or tradition to protest. It was hard to get word across.
Sarah: Which is a huge 180 from what we observe here, even with some in our immediate circles. I mean families will argue over which is the “right” flag, but it just ends at the dinner table.
Sean: Yeah, and it’s interesting how much Vietnamese youth are gravitating towards the art scene. It’s all an archive in its own way.
Sarah: Making art about their day-to-day life…if we put all of those works into the same container then in some ways it’s a capsule of the Vietnam our parents never got to know. The way our parents might experience the expressions of this unknown Vietnam to them may be a parallel to the way we experience these memories of war from a secondary perspective.
Taking everything we’ve discussed in account, how has your research journey impacted the way you are thinking about the Vietnamese-American experience? How did your findings and field research in Vietnam help you further understand our place here?
Sean: I realized that the site of our inspiration and the passion is driven by one’s self-reflexiveness and own sense of urgency for wanting to learn about these things. I think it also affects the degree of critical consciousness. A lot of people our age are stuck at discovering one’s own identities through the way that we’re commercially understood or racialized. These master narratives have led us to believe that our culture is alive only through food and tradition as we know it.
I think the stuff they do at Vietnamese Student Associations, with these traditional dances, for instance, is how those patterns and practices are reiterated and are oftentimes a comfort zone for a lot of Vietnamese Americans. While it’s really great to celebrate our heritage through traditional dances or these grand cultural shows, it’s an echo chamber. These commercialized things become the responsibilities of burden, because we have it in our imagination. We were raised to think about how hard our parents have worked for us.
When we connect our reading and American heritage to large complexities of capitalism and imperialism, we become unburdened as our experience as a Vietnamese American becomes something greater than the family. If we have no tactile relationship with literature, we are missing the chance for our brains to reimagine how the conditions for our world can be. Refusal to read types of literature and diaspora storytelling outside of our cultures restricts empathetic capacity for other diasporas.
Sarah: How would you reimagine it all for yourself?
Sean: I want to feel some type of ancestral soil, to understand ancestry beyond grandparents, to have a developed home. A better imagined world is one where home is a bit more definitive and stable.
SEAN XUÂN HIẾU NGUYỄN (he/they) is a master’s student in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. They received their Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Sean is a multidisciplinary writer and aspiring educator, and their developing research examines Vietnamese American narrative strategies across literature and visual art via personal family archives. They currently work with the San Francisco State 1968-69 BSU/TWLF Strike Digital Oral History Archive. Nguyễn likes Tuesday crosswords, portmanteaus, and audio guides at the museum; he does not like slow walkers, double negatives, and dogs in restaurants.
SARAH NGỌC LƯU (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She gravitates towards photography, ceramics, zines, print-making and music. Her current interest revolves around the experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora and how its complexities are largely preserved through memory. Lưu’s work has touched on themes of their mixed Vietnamese-Chinese identity, intergenerational trauma and cultural traditions. She explores themes outside those topics by grabbing inspiration from her lived experience growing up in the Bay Area surrounded by a vibrant arts and music culture. Lưu holds a BA in Studio Art, Preparation for Teaching from San Jose State University and is currently studying for an MFA in the Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University. Her favorite food is her grandmother’s Bánh Canh and she can roller skate backwards.
Seedling Stories
Adela with Wendy Shih
“For me, sharing books and stories with people is what matters. I am trying to increase access to them because I want to spark that connection between the person and the book, but also between people, with the book as a catalyst. It’s powerful because every single one of us has a role to play in creating this web of interconnectedness.” – Wendy Shih
I met Wendy (施文莉) walking at a Pride Event called Gays Eating the Rich in the Park. I was instantly drawn to her space because the books she had displayed in her Diverse Free Library swap were entirely by disabled, BIPOC, queer authors.
Growing up as an autistic, queer kid in Colombia, I did not see myself in any of the stories that I read. Even the ones where weirdos banded together against “evil” had racist undertones.
Later on, as a Literature major, I realized that even our curriculum was plagued by the European-white canon: I only had one indigenous literature class, a few on Latin American literature, and one on colonial literature. These, however, were invaluable, as they led me to question the negative space: who is not being shown, why not, and if they are (marginally), how are they represented?
This is what drew me to Wendy’s stand that day at the park. As someone who also believes in the power of stories, her decolonial Free Library felt like a usage of that negative space to bring forth the voices of our people of the Global Majority, which the system has been trying to erase.
Here we talk about being atravesadas, people that belong nowhere and everywhere, and our hope that stories can be a seed for connection and action.
Adela: Since the work that you do with Our Little Free Diverse Library has to do with bringing underrepresented people’s stories to the forefront, I want to start with yours. And where better than with the story of your names, in the different cultures you inhabit.
Wendy: I would identify myself as Taiwanese-Chinese. My grandparents were from China on both sides. On my dad’s side, they moved to Taiwan, and had him. I was born and raised in Taiwan by my grandparents .
Now, I completely embrace Taiwan,Taiwanese culture and the direction it’s generally going. But I didn’t realize, when I moved to the US when I was nine, that Taiwan was under martial law my entire life.
But back to my name: Shih (施)is the family name. We put the family name first.
Adela: That is an interesting way to inhabit the world, putting the “we” first.
Wendy: Indeed, it is. And Wén Lì (文莉) is specific to me. So, my Chinese name is pronounced Shī Wén Lì (施文莉), which roughly translates to bestow, literature and Jasmine flower.
Adela: That is beautiful since now you are bestowing decolonial literature to the community with what you do.
Wendy: It is beautiful, but I just started to embrace it within the past few years while doing this work. It made me start unpacking everything. I had forgotten about it and left that name behind when I moved here.
When we arrived, I was given the name Wendy, because it sounded like wén lì. It is that simple, there’s no meaning behind Wendy, other than the fact that it is pronounceable in English, for Americans.
Now, I’m leaning more into my Chinese name, leaning into where I come from, learning about the complexity between China and Taiwan, the politics and culture. I feel like I am still unpacking.
But of course, I’m living here, in the United States of America. My grandparents and my dad immigrated here to raise me, to give me a new life. And now I have kids here, and my husband’s white.
All of this makes me feel like I have two sets of myself, of my identity that I am also trying to put back together, because we are all connected. What I’m really trying to lean into now is connecting to our shared humanity.
Adela: And within those sets of yourself, are there any folk stories, Taiwanese or Chinese, that you have heard or read that you connect to?
Wendy: I don’t really remember. I feel like once I moved here, I was pushed to assimilate. Colonization of the mind and detachment from our roots happen immediately and forcefully, and this is something I’m dealing with, still decolonizing, obviously. Even though it saddens me, it has led to an existential crisis of feeling like I don’t belong anywhere, I am also certain that I don’t want to assimilate here anymore.
But now I believe we all feel this way, to a certain extent, we all feel like we belong nowhere, and that’s actually because we belong everywhere. The colonial values pumped into all of us dictate detachment from ourselves, our land and each other. This is part of the reason why I love sharing stories. I love to hear from other people who may also feel disconnected and are looking to find or remember their own culture’s legacy.
Adela: Yeah. I resonate deeply with that, as a Colombian here, but also as someone whose Lebanese-Syrian family barely passed down their culture. It is so important that we finally see our borderline identities mirrored back to us. What were some of the first stories that made you feel seen?
Wendy: One book that really stuck with me is Reading with Patrick, a memoir by Michelle Kuo. She is Taiwanese American, so I could see myself in some of her culture and background. She described her journey with Teach for America, in one of the poorest counties in the Mississippi Delta, to work with the students there. She formed an unlikely friendship with one Black student named Patrick. We talk about books as mirrors, windows, or sliding glass doors. That book for me was all three. Because I saw pieces of myself, but also of the society we live in, and how we can intersect and embrace each other. It taught me that in the most unlikely places, scenarios, or interactions, you can always find a connection.
For me, sharing books and stories with people is what matters. I am trying to increase access to them because I want to spark that connection between the person and the book, but also between people, with the book as a catalyst.
It’s like planting seeds: when someone reads a book that forms a relationship between the reader and the author, then there’s another one when they recommend it to a friend, and yet another one if we meet at an event. It’s powerful because every single one of us has a role to play in creating this web of interconnectedness.
Adela: How did the first seed happen within you, though? What was happening in your life at the time that brought the first Diverse Free Library to life?
Wendy: I have to say that this work started with anger at our (unjust) system; it is fueling it.
That anger led me to look at my immediate sphere: I started to feel suffocated in my neighborhood, Rock Creek, because it is very homogenous, very white. And while my kids go to a Chinese immersion school with a little more “diversity”, and many mixed families, like ours, I saw so many of them assimilated or sucked into the dominant culture. I wanted to do something about it.
Since our kids were born, we had been taking them to the library, where I specifically looked for books that represented them, our family, and other different cultures to learn from. I would also make sure our home library was diverse. So it really started with our home library.
Shortly after I installed our library box, I became very active with the Little Free Library Organization and saw that they have an initiative called Read in Color, which focuses on sharing diverse and inclusive books. That’s when I thought: that’s what I want to do. I’m gonna have a Read in Color library for the neighborhood. And we are actually located in a perfect spot. It’s a corner where the middle school kids wait for the bus, and people walk by on the way to a trail.
Then I started visiting a lot of the libraries in the Portland metro area, and I saw that diversity was something we really needed. It was lacking. And I still call what I do a Diverse Library, but what I am really trying to focus on is decolonizing our libraries/bookshelves.
Adela: To decolonize our libraries, though, sounds like a complex goal that needs more than one person and one free library to be accomplished. How did you find the collaborators who are also now decolonizing their own libraries with you?
Wendy: Honestly, it happened organically; I didn’t plan it. There was this Vietnamese cake shop nearby that we often went to, and we became friends with the owner. One day, we were chit-chatting, and I was like: Hey, would you like a few books in here for a community book sharing space? And she loved the idea. She cleared out one little cake shelf for me.
Then shortly after that, I met the owner of Stumptown Otaku, which is this anime gift shop in Old Town, and he had seen what I do on my Instagram and asked if I would like to have a library in their store.
And I reached out to Cafe United, because I had always wanted to have my books in a coffee shop. After all, those two things go really well together. I met the owner, Justin, who is from Ghana.I had just come back from a trip over there, we connected on that, he was so sweet and told me to do it right away.
Since it was my third library and I didn’t have enough books to keep stocking it, I set it up as a reference library, and people seemed to enjoy it.
After this, I reached out to APANO. They were doing an Open Studio where people could come in and use their materials to create art and be in community. And so I did my first book swap event with them. It was there that I realized I also love connecting with the people interacting with the books, I love it, I loved it!
Adela: It is amazing how once you gather momentum, doors just start opening up like that. It seems to me that these are all very different types of prospective readers, though. And even though you are creating a decolonial curation, the act of curating is still creating. What is your book selection process like?
Wendy: Yes! I think about the customers who might show up at Café United versus my library at home in the suburb. For example, at Cafe United, The 1619 Project was very popular. Since the anime shop is queer, Asian owned and it gets a lot of kids, teens or adults who are into anime, I put in more graphic novels and Young Adult literature. Books like Lunar Boy.
The library at home has a range of all, so I have two tiers: One for kids and little readers, and one for adults. I approach it more as an intro to anti-racism and social justice library. Like the book by Ibram X. Kendi, it says on the cover: How to be anti-racist, and it has been taken quite a few times, so people are curious.
It took me a while to put this book out because, you know, it makes people feel uncomfortable, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, and it was written by a white woman! I also try to put in kid’s book about racism because not having the ability to talk about what our systems are built on is not helpful. I have met some neighbors who are really thankful for the library, and they come to tell me.
Adela: Has there ever been an example of people who oppose or avoid your mission and libraries?
Wendy: Yes! At the time we made it, I got the sense that some people weren’t really comfortable with it. We have an unofficial neighborhood association, and a newsletter, and the library was not shared. Even when Rock Creek made it to the news with the Library on Willamette week, they never mentioned it.
This reaction also happened when I was tabling at an event that was stationed next to the local police department outreach, and most of the officers never looked at the books even after I invited them ; I felt they went out of their way to not engage with it. Only one came, and she was, of course, a person of color.
Also, a couple of times, the library at my house was vandalized. Not super bad, but like books were taken out and thrown around, with bookmarks left all over the floor.
Adela: This deliberate invisibilization of your work, the avoidance of engagement, the vandalizing, and the general mindfuckery we are living through right now, these are circumstances that can be discouraging. How do you stay inspired to do this work, especially now when it is most needed, when books and underrepresented communities archives are being banned or erased?
Wendy: I definitely go through hard moments. But, like I said, this work is where I put that anger. It has made me realize that I have a certain privilege, living in this neighborhood, being married to a white man, being East Asian and loud about not wanting to assimilate. It is a question of where you are positioned and how you can use that.
So when I go to pop-up events, and I do see people engaged, and books get taken, I feel like stories are getting out there. I can see how we are creating a web of connections. I’m planting seeds. To me, that is one thing that keeps me going.
Also, when I see my kids and feel scared to raise them here in this environment, but I see their innocence, their kindness, I am reminded that we all started out that way. But we ended up as products and victims of colonization.
And while we may feel like we’re struggling through it, I think that’s actually our strength because we are breaking out of the colonization. This process has to be uncomfortable. It has to feel icky and painful. And that has led me to really embrace my sadness, embrace my pain, and use it, turn it into something more beautiful. It’s much easier to feel numb, to just check out, so you don’t have to feel the uncomfortable feelings.
Adela: I resonate with that. I think being able to have agency to transform that pain into creation is so important. And being able to put words to the turmoil of our time and connect with other people around it. It feels like we are breaking through this “don’t air your dirty laundry” paradigm, which was not ours to begin with; this shame, this questioning of our own knowledge, was also a product of and a tool of oppression and colonialism, which breeds this silence and isolation.
Wendy: Absolutely, this is why I think stories are important. I feel like so many people are disconnected. I feel disconnected at times, but I am actively trying to stay true to myself, true to my values, and be in touch with my humanity. And stories do just that, they remind us of our shared humanity.
And people like you and I already feel that love for books, that’s great, but I want more people to have access. Thankfully, we live in a pretty book-loving city, but there are a lot of people who don’t have time to read or haven’t found that book that touches them. So my question is,how do we get the day-to-day people to engage and have these feelings and understand the importance of decolonizing their bookshelf? That is my purpose.
Adela: Speaking of that purpose. Have you ever been told of or experienced that seed of connection and decolonizing going from the page into the world?
Wendy: Yeah, a friend of mine, he’s white and had just read White Fragility, and he said like, wow, that was uncomfortable, but it was so eye-opening. And then, he went a step further: he shared a story where I saw that he took whatever it was that he learned into real life. He didn’t say it explicitly but I saw the connection. There was some drama in his Neighborhood Association and he sent out an email calling them out, explaining some of the issues and that they needed to follow Black and Indigenous community’s leadership. There were even some phrases and concepts in his email that came from that book.
That was the first time that I could see a person not only liking a book but shifting because of it. And I wonder how many of these stories there are that I don’t know about? And, ultimately, I don’t need to know. But I would like to imagine that as we share stories, more and more of this is happening.
Wendy Shih 施文莉 (she/her/她) is a Mom and a volunteer Little Free Library steward who is dedicated to expanding access to diverse and inclusive stories. She created OUR Little Free Diverse Library, which began as a book sharing box in her neighborhood, then expanded it to a small collection of justice and community centered book sharing spaces around the Portland metro area, where anyone can “Take a book. Share a book”.
Wendy is an active participant in the Little Free Library’s Read in Color program. She received a Todd H. Bol award for outstanding achievement and was also included in Willamette Week as one of the “Best of Portland 2024”. She uses her library work to connect with various groups and to help build inter and intra community solidarity. She believes in the power of diverse and inclusive books (and zines and community gatherings) to not only open hearts and minds, but also save lives. Her mission is to connect as many people to these stories as possible as a path towards collective liberation.
Adela is a professional in noticing the beautiful small things in life / Una Profesional en ver las maricaditas lindas de la vida.
Depending on the day, she poses as an Artist, Journalist, Poet, Storyteller, Archivist, Gatherer, Sustainability, and Social Impact Director. But truly, she’s a druid, a plant dressed in the body of a human.
As a Colombian-Lebanese, Autistic x ADHDer, Queer human, she is constantly inhabiting the borderlines and bringing her roots everywhere, to help other people flow with the rivers of their own stories. Her work touches on the themes of family, legacy, mental health, fashion, community storytelling, identity, creativity, and sustainability.
Some of her gifts include an insane ear for music, as well as weaving words and people together. She’s now in the process of getting her MFA in Art + Social Practice at PSU, in Portland, Oregon.
On Family, Feedback Machines, and the Anxiety of the Image
Sarah Blesener in conversation with Leigh Ledare
“The presence of the camera is really important. It plays all these different roles, right? It’s a stage, it’s a mirror, it’s a mother, it’s also a judge. It’s a panopticon. It’s a drug – it’s also a tool that’s used to castrate. It’s also something like a priest that allows a confession.” – Leigh Ledare
Last year, I came across a flyer for a workshop at Leigh Ledare’s studio in the Bronx. The first line read, “The process of making what we might call ‘invested’ work cannot take place in a vacuum.”
At the time, all I knew of Leigh sounded like rumor: that he’d once maybe skateboarded professionally, that he might have lived with Larry Clark, that he may or may not be close to Nan Goldin, and that there existed lots of unsettling images of his mother. All lore to the side: I remember meeting Leigh, sharing with him my woes, and a mess of images and notes. He didn’t flinch. Over the next year, a small group of us gathered monthly at his studio to show unfinished work.
Leigh often spoke about how, in families, authorship is collective – that each member contributes, consciously or not, to a shared mythology that keeps evolving. He encouraged us to look at the ways agency shifts within that system, to see how every gesture or refusal reshapes the narrative over time. Meeting Leigh helped me recognize how those narratives, and the roles we inhabit within them, might be holding us in place, and how shifting our relationship to them could open up whole new ways of seeing.
Leigh’s film The Task is less a film about a group than an experiment in what happens when the act of watching becomes the very thing under study. Over three days in Chicago, twenty-eight strangers, ten psychoanalysts, and a team of camera operators gathered to enact a Tavistock-style Group Relations Conference: a temporary institution designed to study itself. In this setup, the usual distance between observer and participant collapses: the analysts observe, the cameras observe, and everyone is forced to contend with their own role in the system. What unfolds is not therapy, exactly, but a collective inquiry into perception, power, and complicity. As the group turns its attention to its own dynamics, and to the cameras that encircle them, the film becomes an evolving system studying itself, a portrait of consciousness under observation.
In this conversation, we spoke about The Task, the ethics of implication, the trapdoor of visibility, the grave as a conceptual art piece with a gift tag, and all the unspoken hauntings we drag with us. Before signing off, Leigh added, “let’s keep talking about how to not get pinned down—how to move laterally out of expectations.”
Sarah Blesener: Leigh. Can we discuss what the hell happened in The Task?
Leigh Ledare: It’s important to parse the method because it is a sort of intervention into Tavistock group relations, a movement that began in the 1940s in the UK. What this group developed into was a sort of systems-based group psychoanalysis with three to five day immersive conferences: the goal of it was to enact a temporary institution whose purpose is to study itself, a kind of feedback machine that brings to the fore neurosis within the group.
What I ended up doing for The Task was making an intervention into that method. I hired a group of 6 camera operators and 10 analysts trained in the method, and they led 28 participants, across-section of people from Chicago, through a series of small and large groups over the course of three immersive days – the task being to examine one’s own behavior in the here and now.
The typical doctor/patient relationship is recast here to be something along the lines of worker and management, so there’s an inherent kind of balance of authority the work is organized around. And this is a reflection on the institution. It brings up these questions of haves and have-nots, grievances, and authority (who’s authorized to speak to what and who isn’t?) play out along both identity and power lines.
One of the things that happened in the film was that there were two institutions placed in conflict with each other. There was the institution of their therapy method and the model of a feedback machine around institutional life. And then there was also the institution of aesthetics – the idea of the film.
Of course, it raised questions and anxieties around privacy. What happens in the here and now, and what gets to stay in the here and now? In other words, what does it mean to actually create a representation of all of this? And there’s an issue that was raised in the middle of this – what does one actually consent to when it’s unknown what will unfold? What can one consent to?
I don’t simply want to document a conference. What I want to do instead is to create a conference with cameras, where the cameras and the camera operators and myself, as the director of this film, are actually part of the conference. It was a way of incorporating the issue of the mediated nature of subjectivity and the question of control in our society, and raising the question of how we’re always being watched and the voyeurism that culture contains today.
“How do you construct a space where things can be spoken about that you know are present but might not be able to see directly? How do we work with the tension of the prohibition of what can be spoken about or not? And this is where it gets interesting – art being this permission, giving a structure to reflect on things that might make us uneasy, but which, if we don’t attend to, if we don’t perform a proper burial, so to say, we drag them forward throughout our life.”
Sarah Blesener: I mean, I was even surprised with some of the topics that people brought up. It was…deeply uncomfortable as a viewer. I’m wondering if you could talk about how you use abjection, and what that lens opens up for you in spaces like these.
Leigh Ledare: Well, it’s not transgression for transgression’s sake, even though it does poke at things that aren’t being addressed or looked at. But it’s more so to create space so that the permission to think about them can come forward. That’s what a lot of art has done. And I think it’s important to say… counter to a moral impulse to keep one’s hands clean and pretend that we don’t participate in this, or to act as if we don’t have unconscious baggage or unconscious hostility that we bring into situations – this work has tried to really acknowledge where we’re implicated, you know?
Sarah Blesener: Yeah. Can you say more about this idea of implication? What draws you to that in your work?
Leigh Ledare: I think it is a way to get into the depths of certain things. If you don’t implicate yourself, you’re pretending that you’re sort of staying clean from it all. It’s a distancing, right? It’s a way of repressing your own involvement. If you can’t address it, if you can’t metabolize it in some way, you can’t understand how you might be further enacting something that trickles through the system. So there’s something about an ethics here – a switch from a morality to a kind of ethics in which you don’t, from the outside, say “this is good or this is bad.” Rather, “this is the reality of the situation and the complexity of the situation, and this is how I position myself inside of it.”
I guess the culture I grew up on, and the sort of artists that I’ve loved, have also approached it a little differently. They haven’t made art that has to be a kind of telegraphing of their alignment with a certain thing – like, “we’re on this side, we’re not on this side. We fit the morality of this structure and not this structure.” My interests have been more Paul McCarthy, Philip Guston, or filmmakers like Kiarostami. Guston is not aligned with the scenes that he’s painting. In a way, what he’s saying is somehow, I’m implicated in this, and I’m uncomfortable being implicated in this, and at the same time, this stuff is being rammed down my throat, and I’m going to kind of regurgitate it as a way of commenting on the reality of that situation. If he doesn’t implicate himself, he can’t get access to the levels of what’s at play.
Sarah Blesener: Even watching it [the Task], it was really uncomfortable – I had to pause it many times. Did this work complicate your ideas around everything we’re talking about with anxieties and biases, and group dynamics?
Leigh Ledare: Well, you’re constructing a kind of field. As a participant, it’s one thing, but as a viewer, you’re also having to locate yourself somewhere. You know, by virtue of identification or identity or sympathies, however you want to play it – there’s really no safe place to stand. So, in a way, it was a portrait of the paranoia of society.
The group in the film forms a kind of collective ego in some way. It’s kind of like the group as a whole is a representative of a social psyche, and all the different parts of that psyche, all the different polls – the sadistic and masochistic polls, the erotic and death drive, all of these are present in their destructivity, the linking and unlinking and binding and unbinding. All of those impulses are present in there just as they’re present in the mind internally, but also in relationship to the subject and the other.
Sarah Blesener: You know I come from a documentary background where there’s this huge push towards authenticity. And one time you described that impulse as maybe a reaction to a fear of voyeurism. I’ve since felt really challenged in my own “willingness to go there” – and we don’t have to get fully into the project about your mom, but in regards to collaborating with her and thinking about subjectivity and implication, can you maybe speak a bit about where this work comes in?
Leigh Ledare: In terms of the work with my mother, I started making those pictures when I was 20 years old. There was a need to sort out what was happening in the family. Previously, my mother had danced for the New York City Ballet, and then now she was dancing as the erotic dancer at the Deja Vu, which was a nightclub directly next door to the apartment building where my grandparents lived. At first, it was kind of a way of distancing myself, but then it turned into a way of questioning what was happening inside the situation.
I don’t see the project simply as being a work about me and my mother or about my desire towards her – that’s secondary. There are other, more complex issues at play – how she’s wielding her sexuality towards different ends – in a way to shield herself from her aging to find a benefactor and a man who might take care of her at a moment when she was being faced with my grandmother’s decline. But also she was refuting my grandfather in a very, very loaded way for how he expected her to behave as a daughter and as a mother and as a woman her age.
And somehow I was introducing the camera into this, but the camera was kind of imbricated into a structure that already existed, like the veins on a leaf or something. This was a way of sounding it out. It was a way of materializing something that otherwise would remain immaterial and wouldn’t get processed.
Sarah Blesener: Were there moments of crisis for you throughout this?
Leigh Ledare: Yeah, I mean, certainly. In the most serious way, the question of whether to publish it as a book and to make it public. I guess it comes back to that question of dirty laundry or something, right? Do you even allow yourself the permission? I mean there’s reality and the things that are depicted that you can capture on a camera. And then there’s other issues of psychic reality that I think the work was trying to get at, like what is it to make that work relative to the symbolic markers that are present? Meaning the mother, the archetype of the mother, or the archetype of the parent. And what is it as a viewer to look at that work? Does it make you actually open up a space to reflect on your own relationships to people whom you have both affection and also love and hate towards? You know, because these relationships are so complicated, the needs are so heavy, and the disappointments are so brutal.
Also, the book is slipcased in a photograph that my grandfather sent each member of our family – the same day he presented us all with grave plots for Christmas.
Sarah Blesener: ….
Leigh Ledare: Well, and the fucked up thing was it was kind of like him acknowledging the impossible fragmentation in the family, but also inside of his impending decline and mortality, and basically saying “Before I die myself, this is the opportunity. I’d love to see you all together in life, rather than in death.”
And then I took that grave plot and attempted to give it as a gift to MOMA.
Sarah Blesener: How did that go?
Leigh Ledare: Well, it’s interesting. It’s still a conversation. The idea for it would be that when transferring the property to MOMA, they would own it so that nobody else could be buried there. So, the gift would actually be the grave plot, and it would actually be a gap between the other plots, which would speak to the lack that precipitated the gift in the first place. It’s a crazy one, but there is this piece about the ambivalence of the family, and also mapping that over the idea of the ambivalence around inclusion in the art world and in the “collection.”
Sarah Blesener: Leigh. That’s wild.
Leigh Ledare: The question with all of that stuff comes back to – how do you, how do you sublimate something? How do you take something that’s unfortunate and use it in a way that you can start to ask real questions with it?
And I would say one other thing about The Task, which is that the presence of the camera is really important. It plays all these different roles, right? It’s a stage, it’s a mirror, it’s a mother, it’s also a judge. It’s a panopticon. It’s a drug – it’s also a tool that’s used to castrate. It’s also something like a priest that allows a confession.
So you know, a lot of the work was dealing with these blind spots – these absolute resistances to being able to metabolize what was.
Sarah Blesener: What you mentioned before – the ability to look at ourselves and start from this place of private memory and reckoning with our own roles – do you have any advice for those of us who are afraid of being read symptomatically in our work?
Leigh Ledare: You know, I’m working as an analyst. Now, one thing that you realize is there’s no one out there who doesn’t have some sort of fraught relationship to things, if it hasn’t gone examined. So the question becomes, where can you find the places where you speak from and with the most truthfulness about your situation, in a way that can’t be dismissed? Because so much of the fear of the symptomatic reading is the fear of dismissal. And yet collectively, we have so much to share. None of us is without the drives and the pull between the productive and destructive urge, right?
There’s a great value in understanding how all of those parts fit together to drive something. Circling back to The Task, that film is basically lifting the hood of the car to see how the pieces underneath the hood fit together in a way to drive society, right? There’s a similar thing in one’s own work, that is, understanding that we’re a kind of accumulation of experiences, events, and positions. We take up strategies, even unconsciously, to cope with or to defend ourselves against something. The idea becomes, how is it that we can own it? How is it we can be responsible? How is it that we can act from an ethical position, which means to take responsibility for what it is that we do?
I think your question goes back to this issue of how quickly it is that people flatten the complexity of experience to simply fit into their kind of cookie cutter conception of where they put things.
The book [with my mother] that I would have made today is very different from the book I made then. But no less, its significance isn’t dampened by the fact that it’s not exactly what I would have made now. It’s in conversation with who I am now. And that’s this thing about doing this kind of work, this sort of afterwardsness of it. A memory of an event will shift based on how we need to remember it at a given point in time. These things become symbolic. They become templates for how we read ourselves. Another way to put that is if you made a work that simply ossified who you were, and that was the beginning and end of the story, and it wasn’t continued to be elaborated on or worked on or reframed or placed in a different, broader context, or in the context of time passing… then that might be problematic.
Everything demands a constant elaboration, a constant destabilizing of its meaning, and a constant kind of understanding of it from different angles. And, I have to say – the mistake is valuable. I think we’re too afraid of making mistakes.
Leigh Ledare creates work that raises questions of agency, intimacy and consent, transforming the observer into the voyeur of private scenes or situations dealing with social taboos. Using photography, the archive, language, and film, he explores notions of subjectivity in a performative dimension, his interventions putting in tension the realities of social constructions and the projective assumptions that surround them. Ledare’s projects have been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad. Ledare’s work is in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. In 2017, Ledare was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Sarah Blesener is an educator, artist, and visual researcher interested in the complexity of human relationships and their visual representation. Their approach uses guided participatory expression, pedagogy, and collaborative methodologies. Alongside photographs, Sarah uses archival imagery, mixed media, poetry, and painting. They are currently an MFA student at PSU studying Art and Social Practice.
We’re Just People Being People With People:
The Potential of Peer Support As A Practice In Mutuality
Interview with “H” of Project Belong
“What we really try to promote is the idea that we all belong in society, that individuals who are marginalized as a result of their experiences in life can, through spaces like Project Belong and Social Club, maybe regain some sense of reintegration with a broader community… [peer support] is in some ways potentially revolutionary.” – ‘H’
‘H’ and I first met several years ago when I began working as a Peer Support Specialist on Project Respond’s mobile crisis intervention team. Project Respond is a team of licensed mental health counselors and peers who offer support to a person or family who is experiencing a mental health crisis. The team provides in-the-moment support, assessment, safety planning, and connection to additional community resources at a person’s home or out in the community.
Since 2015, ‘H’ and his collaborator, Sharon Eastman, have been running “Project Belong” as part of the Project Respond crisis response program. Project Belong is space for community members who interact with the crisis team and need additional stabilization support after a mental health crisis. Sharon and ‘H’ meet with participants on an individual basis and in a social support network called ‘Social Club,’ which is offered to individuals seeking community connection.
‘H’ has been working as a certified peer support specialist for over a decade. Prior to working in peer support, he studied physics and worked in the aerospace and semiconductor industry.
Deets: When people who aren’t in the mental health field ask me what peer support is, I have a hard time doing the elevator pitch thing. So I wanted to ask you how you talk about it, in your own words?
H: I basically just say we share and leverage our experiences and see if it’s beneficial to the individuals that we’re speaking to, and it doesn’t even have to be. It’s just sharing life experiences. If there’s commonality, which in peer support is also called mutuality, then we can start a conversation.
Oftentimes it’s a conversation that establishes a relationship, but it’s the relationship which I think people find to be the most helpful.
Most of the people we meet really want to talk and to be heard. When you first meet, it’s usually resource-related because those are the tangible needs on a person’s mind. And also, you don’t have to expose any vulnerabilities. But then people start to open up and say, “well, I never told anybody, but when this happened, etc, etc.”
Once we say, “Oh, hey, that’s similar to my experience,” then you establish mutuality. The other thing is, I think a lot of peers are very good at listening and not invalidating. That’s the whole thing. Just listen, don’t invalidate.
We accept people however they are and we recognize our own value as well as the value of others. And it’s not about us establishing what it is that needs to happen in our relationship, it’s about working together to establish what the relationship is.
We get to set up the rules together.
Deets: Yes!
That makes me think about an aspect of peer support that’s hard for me to explain. You know, because our work is person-centered and is very case by case it can be sort of subversive. To me,
peer support is a radical movement, because it’s flexible and it’s outside of a medical model of mental health. I think there’s a liberatory aspect to it too. It’s not all about outcomes; there’s what we’re doing in the moment, but if you step back, and take in all the unseen, gradual things that happen really slowly and happen maybe even after we met with the person, it becomes a ripple effect. We rarely get to see the more lasting impacts of our time together.
H: Definitely. And you can’t predict what those impacts will be.
Project Belong had a participant that we met with for, I think, seven or eight years. We tried to disengage from that individual a few years back, and we got an email from our supervisor that said, “the client says you guys are the only ones that he ever talks to in a week, so can you please keep meeting with him?”
Deets: Wow.
H: Another thing is, oftentimes, participants are invalidated by mental health providers so you hear responses like, ‘you probably don’t believe what I’m saying.’
And this is especially true if someone has been told that their experience is a delusion.
So I say, ‘well no, that’s not it.
I believe exactly what you’re saying.
I accept your reality, so please accept mine.
My reality is I’m not experiencing what you are experiencing. I’m not saying that you’re wrong or making it up, your opinion and your experience matters, it’s just different from mine.”
Deets: Exactly. I don’t want to dismiss the reality of what someone is seeing that I can’t see, but I also refuse to lie and say I can see it.
H: I mean, what even is a delusion?
I think the people who use the word ‘delusion’ are delusional because they’re suggesting that they can read somebody else’s mind! It’s just that the way that some people interpret the world is different. And in so-called behavioral health, this is often
equated with ‘noncompliance.’ They tried to say this about people like Galileo. People who had these really wild ideas were just ‘delusional’. Well, no, they just had insight that no one else had.
Deets: You’ve been a facilitator of the program “Project Belong” for some time now, can you explain how it got started and share a little about its evolution?
H: Sharon is the visionary behind a lot of the peer support happenings with Project Belong.
When we started out, we would get referrals from the Project Respond crisis response team just like we do now, and from there we’d go and meet people out in the community. For many years she and I would meet with individuals mostly together. But then somehow, you know, we just got too popular.
Deets: [Laughs]
And then there’s “Social Club” which is the group-based aspect of Project Belong. Can you explain a little bit about what Social Club is?
H: Basically, we just think of it as a social club. It’s not a support group or about mental health, but it’s completely about mental health.
[laughs]
We tell the individuals who are referred to Project Belong and who seem like they may benefit from a regularly occurring social space, “look, this is not like a group at the clinic. This is just like if you had a group of friends that hang out regularly.” It doesn’t mean you can’t talk about things that you’re struggling with, but yeah, that’s the framework.
Often Project Belong invites the social club out to a cafe, and we pay the tab for everybody. Sharon has told me that some people really were touched by the idea that anybody would be willing to spend a couple of bucks to buy them a cup of coffee and spend time with them. And that’s really the point. What we really try to promote is the idea that we all belong in society, that individuals who are marginalized as a result of their experiences in life can, through spaces like Project Belong and Social Club, maybe regain some sense of reintegration with a broader community. It’s in some ways potentially revolutionary.
Deets: Oh, definitely. There are so few options for a lot of people to be welcomed into a social group without many formalities other than being respectful of the collective needs of that community.
H: Yes, and that’s one thing to mention, it is open to everybody, and we do treat everybody the same, but the expectations for everybody are also the same. Sometimes there will be someone that can’t participate in a way that feels safe for everyone. So, it’s open to everybody that’s willing to participate as a group.
We don’t ever suggest what’s appropriate or inappropriate behavior, but we do have to say there are some things you just can’t do at Social Club. I think that’s a really important boundary for any social club to maintain. You have to think about how to create a space that more people can feel more comfortable, more often.
Deets: I’m wondering if there is anything you would really like the general public to know about peer support work?
H: Many of us, I think, are socialized to, well, because you have this deficiency or this condition or this limitation, you shouldn’t trust yourself; You should trust others who know better.
But the reality is they don’t live here. [points to chest]
I live here, right?
So learning to trust ourselves, and support each other in doing so is a big part of peer support. Honestly, it’s really just about humans supporting humans, and that can go either way. How do you do that? You share experiences.
And then what happens? You established a relationship.
And from there, you decide (hopefully without a lot of interference), what’s really important? What do you want to do next?
When it works well, that’s what we’re doing. So, to be honest, everybody can do this. We’re just people being people with people.
Deets: [Laughs] That’s your new commercial.
H: I just made that up.
“H” prefers to not over emphasize himself in the work he does as a Peer Wellness Specialist and asked that instead of using his name, I refer to him as “H.”
Peer Support Specialist: (noun) A person trained in effective strategies for sharing their own lived experiences with mental health or substance use recovery in ways that foster hope and resiliency to an individual beginning a healing process. Peers share resources, provide advocacy, and assist in building skills for self-empowerment.
*If you or someone you know is in crisis:
• 988: National Crisis Hotline
• 503-988-4888: Multnomah Co. Crisis Line
(For Project Respond, call this number)
• 877-565-8860: Trans Lifeline
• 877-968-8491: Youth Warmline
• 1-800-698-2392: Peer Support Warmline
I’m Very Angry, I’m Extremely Angry About it.
Haruka Ostley in conversation with Tonye Stuurman
“Not a lot of women have the privilege, or can express or can’t speak out about it. So I think…That was my thing… I need to get this out there.” – Tonye Stuurman
I met Tonye in Shanghai while I was an artist-in-residence at the Yew Chung Education Foundation. Her husband worked at the school, and one day she stopped by my studio and asked if I could help create a community artwork for a grief memorial—an event meant to bring people together who hadn’t been able to mourn their loved ones during COVID, especially expats far from home. From that first conversation, I was moved by Tonye’s warmth, passion, and the decades she has devoted to supporting survivors of gender-based violence and young adults facing mental health challenges. Since then, I’ve been grateful for the chance to collaborate with her on several meaningful projects, including our recent Kintsugi workshop for the 16 Days of Activism, a continuation of our shared commitment to supporting women in need.
H: Can you tell me a bit about your background, what drew you to journalism, and how your experiences eventually led you to move to Shanghai?”
T: I’m from Cape Town, South Africa—born and raised there. I did all my schooling and went to university in Cape Town, where I studied journalism. After working for several years in journalism and communication, I decided to do a postgraduate degree in Women and Gender Studies. That decision came from a personal experience—I was raped back in 1995. It’s something that’s stayed with me, and it really shaped the way I see the world. As a journalist, I was already reporting on issues like violence against women and children—unfortunately, it’s a huge problem in South Africa—but going through it myself made me realize I wanted to dig deeper and do something about it.
I do think there’s a huge connection to our apartheid history. You know, in a country that went through apartheid, most of the victims or survivors tend to be Black people. There are so many connections—poverty, unemployment, patriarchy—it’s a whole system, and it’s deeply tied to our very messed-up history. Having spent time interviewing children and women who had gone through these experiences, and then experiencing it myself, I realized that I was somewhat privileged compared to many others—I had a platform and a voice I could use. That led me to start a volunteer group in my community, which we called a support group. Through this group, we began training ourselves and inviting organizations to come in and teach us. In the 1990s in South Africa, there were many organizations working on violence against women. Unlike today, we had to actively reach out and build relationships. We also worked closely with our local police station and set up a weekly roster on weekends to provide support and outreach in the community. Our support group would be on call– if the police got a case, they would call us, we would go down to the police station, and we would sit with that person throughout the interviewing process. We would also go with that person to the hospital for the examination, and just be with that person, support them, and all of this was voluntary. Apart from those support services we provided, we also worked on public awareness and education. We went to schools, we went to churches, and we regularly had. these meetings with the police to sort of train them on how to approach victims and how to speak to them. I had a horrible experience with the police and I had a horrible experience with a doctor that examined me. You can then understand why people don’t want to take these cases further–If you are treated like that by the system, why would you want to take a case further?
H: Can you share how your personal experiences shaped the way you approach supporting victims and survivors?
T: I think it’s about making that person feel that they are being seen and heard. I think that they are not being treated as if they are an inconvenience, or they do not matter or they are just another number. I remember how I felt when the detective took me to this dark area alone with him in the car. He said I needed to pick up the rape kit from another building and wasn’t at the police station. I was alone with him in his car, and I didn’t know him. The kinds of things the doctors said to me, “Oh, why didn’t you take a bath?” or “Why are you letting me come out in the middle of the night?”For them, it was an inconvenience. So the way you treat victims or survivors is so important because we already have this stigma around violence, rape, and abuse. “She was asking for it,” or “she deserves that”, or “It’s her fault,” or “Why was she there at that time? Why didn’t she do this?” and “Why, Why, Why?” As a support person, it’s important for you to show that person, hey, “I don’t care about anything else. I am here for you.” So I think that was important. We had an amazing group of volunteers. and I’m talking from working women to housewives, to students, to high school students, to even young men. We all came together to listen, learn, and support those who needed it.
T: This work stuck with me as a true community effort. It was about people coming together.
H: That’s so wonderful. You reminded us how vital it is to treat survivors with genuine care and dignity — being seen, heard, and believed can make all the difference. It also shows the power of community when people come together to listen and support with compassion. So that the person doesn’t have to feel alone.
H: Having lived in both South Africa and China, how have these different cultural contexts shaped your approach to healing and supporting others? I’m sure it’s a very different experience.
T: It’s relative! We’ve been in Shanghai for 13 years now. When we left South Africa, it was… 2005. We went to the Middle East for 4 years. And then we came back to Africa, and we were in this little landlocked country.
During those years-the 4 in the Middle East and the year in Lesotho – I didn’t have the opportunities to really follow what I really wanted to do. In the Middle East, things are hidden and it was difficult to fully follow my passions.
It was such a different culture, so if you didn’t personally know someone, there weren’t really any organizations or resources to go to. You could try to help when you heard about somebody in need—but those opportunities were very few and far between. When we came to China in 2013, I only got connected to this work again because my daughter was struggling with anxiety. I was looking for a counselor for her and found this organization. At that time, our medical insurance didn’t cover mental health, so I had to find someone affordable, because it’s really expensive. I found the Community Center in Shanghai and connected with a counselor named Katie, who was amazing. She said, “Oh, this is what you’ve been doing—you should get back into it.” And that’s how I started volunteering again. It’s a very different environment here. We’re connected in different ways—not as much face-to-face, but more over social media.
H: Social media?
T: Yes, there isn’t that one-on-one connection here. Everything is done over social media—people reach out, ask for help, you refer them, and that’s where it ends. You usually don’t see or hear from them again.
H: That’s interesting. I imagine the stigma around gender-based violence is strong in the culture. People may be afraid to be seen or to connect with others in public spaces to talk about it. It might feel easier for them not to meet someone in person, to stay anonymous instead. The longer the relationship with a counselor, the more serious it becomes — so I assume they prefer not to form deeper or long-term relationships.
T: I had to adapt the way that I think because I am more…
H: Person-to-person, right?
T: Exactly.
T: But this is our situation, and so we need to deal with it and make the best of what we can. It’s also very hidden here– People take a while before they ask for help, and they don’t speak very easily. I’m speaking here specifically about the expat community. You have to constantly consider who this person is and where they come from. That respect for diversity is really, really important.
H: Do you think the community has changed or evolved at all over your 30 years as an advocate, or do you feel it’s still moving very slowly? Is it still somewhat taboo to talk about these issues, or have you noticed any shifts?
T: Do you want the truth?
H: Yes, I want your honest opinion.
T: I’m very angry, I’m extremely angry about it. It pisses me off when people say, “Yes, but we’ve come so far.” And I’m like… really? Have we really come that far? If I look at what we did more than 20 years ago in South Africa, and then compare it to other countries I’ve lived in, I see how far behind they are in dealing with gender-based violence. Yes, South Africa has the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world and the highest rates of HIV,but we are also a country where people come together. If we’re not happy with something, we make our voices heard. If we want to take action, we do it.
H: That sounds like a supportive community..
T: Exactly. It happens, and I think also in South Africa, there is shame around it, and there’s still the stigma- but it is not like nobody talks about it. It’s not hidden.
T: Especially when a child is being hurt, the community steps in. In South Africa, we have this belief: “My child is your child.” We grow up in communities where the auntie next door—even if she’s not related to you—can check on you as a parent because she has the right to do that. We still hold onto that idea, where accountability isn’t just within the family but extends throughout the community.
H: That’s wonderful! In Japanese culture, especially today, people tend to avoid getting involved when there’s trouble. So even when someone is clearly in need, others often stay away. Sadly, many cases of gender-based violence or child abuse are discovered too late, even when victims had been asking for help or showing some signs. I truly admire open and warm-hearted communities like that.
H: Will you also tell me more about your Writing Wounds into Healing workshop, which uses storytelling as a form of recovery? How do you see writing helping survivors reclaim their voice?
T: You know, I think storytelling can be a form of recovery—it helps people process their pain. For me, with my background in journalism, I’ve always been drawn to writing. A few years ago, I became really serious about wanting to write a book—specifically about the experiences of young Black South African women in China, because it’s such a significant topic. I found this amazing publisher in South Africa who offers an eight-week online course on writing. As a journalist, you think you’re a writer, but there’s a big difference between journalistic writing and other forms of writing. I was so inspired by her. When I was in South Africa on holiday, I attended a full-day workshop with her. She’s incredible—she publishes most of the top South African books and is really passionate about people sharing their stories. When I came back to China after the workshop, she mentioned the eight-week online course, and I thought, “Ooh, I’m in!” And she would guide you through the whole process. These exercises were really interesting. She would have us do meditation exercises. She would send recordings, and once you finished a meditation, she’d say, “Now get up and write.” She had exercises that would bring out so many things in writing that you’d never even considered before. It was very personal, very biographical—it was all about yourself, your life, and how you tell your story.
Anyway, a few years ago, I was asked to be part of a hospital group. They wanted to start sexual trauma support groups. So I was very privileged to be asked to be part of that group of facilitators. We were trained by an amazing organization in the US called Hope Recovery. They trained us to be online facilitators for sexual trauma support groups. During COVID, a lot of people were online all the time, so we had a huge response to these people joining support groups. From that experience, I thought it would be helpful to create something for people to write, because for some people, it’s easier to write than to speak about their experiences
I sat for a while, and I put together this 8-week online program called Writing Wounds into Healing. This was specifically aimed at survivors of sexual trauma. Each session focused on different aspects of participants’ experiences: how sexual trauma has affected their lives, how they feel now, and so on. The sessions would start with free writing to clear the mind, followed by exercises with two or three prompts. So people would free-write to clear their minds, and then, we would go into prompted exercises, and we would have 10 to 15 minutes writing. It was amazing to see how powerful the process was for people—just giving themselves the space to reflect, process, and express through writing.
H: That’s a fantastic process. I also used drawing as part of my own personal healing journey, so I can totally relate. It’s wonderful to have the camaraderie of others supporting you through it. Sometimes people don’t know where to begin, so having those prompts must have been really encouraging.
T: And, yeah, writing isn’t for everyone but for those who do it, it can be really powerful. Some people prefer meditation, or yoga, everyone’s got their own thing. I ran that eight-week program a few years ago, and you won’t believe it, a month ago, someone messaged me saying, “I haven’t forgotten those eight weeks. If you do it again, please let me know.” That really made me realize how impactful certain things can be for people. We also did work during the 16 Days campaign, using some of their writings in a Kintsugi workshop. For me, the most important part isn’t just talking about statistics—it’s about hearing people’s voices. Whether it’s through a Kintsugi workshop, art, writing… whichever way someone is comfortable expressing themselves, it matters. Voices need to be heard, whether it’s mental health, gender-based violence, or anything else. I can stay and talk about my own experiences when needed, but recently I told someone, “I want to start writing again, but I don’t want to write about my trauma anymore. I’m done with that.” People have asked me over the last couple of years if I want to share, and I’ve said no—it’s time for someone else’s voice to be heard.
I don’t have a problem sharing when it’s necessary, but I truly feel it’s more important that people’s voices are heard. That’s where connection comes in—because when you hear someone’s story, you can connect to something in their experience.
H: Yeah… and I just think it’s amazing how open and vulnerable you’ve been—how you let yourself be seen in that way, and how that, in turn, makes others feel safe to open up too. I’m curious—what gave you the courage?
T: I don’t know. I think it started with anger. I think that’s been a twist.
H: Oh, that’s really honest — your motivation came from a true, genuine impulse, not from pretending to help others for the sake of appearance. It’s inspiring how you were able to turn that anger into energy that encouraged others to rise up while also offering them big support.
T: I was very angry. I don’t think I went through the whole cycle of… I don’t know, but it was definitely anger. Every time I thought about it, I was angry—angry because I experienced something that so many women go through. And for me, that was… but those women don’t… like I mentioned to you at the beginning…Not a lot of women have the privilege to express themselves. Or, for many reasons, they can’t speak about it. So I think that was my thing– I needed to get this out there.
H: So in a way, you felt a sense of responsibility because of your privileged life. But I’m sure it wasn’t easy to speak up because it meant telling your parents and letting everyone know what happened to you.
T:I think my parents struggled a lot, because I was so public. I would do TV interviews, and I would do newspaper interviews, and my poor parents just had to deal with whatever because I needed to get my story out there so people could hear, so that women could understand that we need to deal with this issue.
H: You mentioned that your mother once told you your experience happened because you weren’t going to church. Reactions like that from others must have made it even harder to share your story.
T: That’s right. I feel I was just angry, and that is where it started off. It’s been almost 30 years and I still have to tell this story? That’s my question. When I was going through those years of doing workshops, and we were doing marches, and we were speaking in public,–In my mind, I thought, the next generation is going to have it better, because we are doing so much work. And now… I have a daughter. And I worry, constantly, is she going to be okay?
H: I can only imagine. I feel it’s harder to detect now since most gender-based violence happens within a single household. Even people who need mental support often connect privately online, so community networks aren’t very visible. I don’t even know my neighbors, which makes it harder to find support from others.
T: And so, in my mind, I’m back in that angry phase again. I really thought it was going to be better for her. I thought the work we had done meant we’d never have to go back there—that women wouldn’t be treated like this anymore. And now I think, what has really changed? I still have to check if her tracker is on her room key, and I even bought her a little alarm when she went to university. I’m like, “Please, the alarm must be on you!” Why?
H: Right.
T: You know what I’m saying? And I’m sorry if people think that I’m pessimistic, but I just cannot help it. I just cannot help it, because I know there are these amazing organizations and amazing women across the world who are putting in their everything in doing this work every day in their communities, and it gets to a point where you think, what’s the use? Nothing is changing, nothing is changing. So, after 30 years, I’m angry again.
H: Maybe having anger is motivating, because you speak up, and so openly, and doing that gives power to people around you.
T: I think that’s why, three years ago, I started the 16 Days project in Shanghai. I was like, “Hey, have you heard of 16 Days?” In South Africa, we’ve been doing 16 Days for years, and people here were like, “What is that?” In a way, I feel like this little girl from Africa can come to Shanghai and teach them a thing or two. You know what I mean? I really love that. I think, “You don’t know about these things?” So, 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence is huge for me. In South Africa it’s an international campaign. Starting it off in Shanghai… I don’t care if only 10 people hear about it, or 20—I have to do it every year.
H: That seems like a difficult thing to do, and you’re doing it amazingly, because your environment does not allow for you to have these kinds of campaigns, and there’s a lot of restrictions.
T: Right. There’s not been a year that we haven’t had issues. But for me, it’s important. You need to surround yourself with a network of people that are genuine and that understand and have good intentions. You are just one person in this whole scheme of things.
H: Right.
T: It’s not like I saved somebody’s life or anything… It takes belief, you know what I’m saying? It really takes a village to make change.
Beautiful Misunderstandings
Peery Sloan in conversation with Shimabuku
“I never read guidebooks. I don’t want stereotypes. I’m not afraid of misunderstanding. Sometimes, a beautiful misunderstanding is better than a good understanding.” – Shimabuku
I met Shimabuku at an artist residency after what sounded like a small odyssey from Japan. Polite, tired, and direct, he asked if he needed a key. He didn’t—and in that moment, it felt like we both recognized one another as bearers of a certain, peculiar logic. A few days later, at his talk, he showed a video of himself dressed as Santa Claus in spring—standing by the sea as trains passed, a fleeting red figure glimpsed and gone. His work—disarming, funny, and quietly tender—doesn’t announce itself; it lingers, aiming, as he says, to “make the heart flutter.” I wanted to know what that means to him, and how he thinks about where art, play, and daily life meet.
Peery: When I first saw your work this summer, I was struck by how playful it was—and how much joy there was in it. Sometimes it even felt a little absurd, but in a way that made the world feel lighter. Can you talk about the role of play and humor in your work?
Shimabuku: My opinion is that art should be something for a bigger sense of peace. It has to make people happy. So first, I try to make myself happy. If I’m happy, maybe I can make others happy too. That’s my theory.
It’s like music—pop or rock music, or a love song. It might start as love for one person, but it becomes something everyone can share. Like Layla by Eric Clapton—it’s not only for him and one person, but for everyone.
P: So you start with something personal, and then it opens up.
S: Yes. I think that’s what art should do.
P: You’ve often worked with animals—like the octopus you took on a journey. What drew you to that piece?
S: Octopus is a kind of local colleague for me. I grew up in Kobe, and we have a lot of octopus there. When I was a child, I used to see them walking on the ground, which was normal. Later I realized most people didn’t know that, so I wanted to share it.
When I began to study octopus more, I found out so much more. It became fun to learn about something from home. Maybe that’s why I wanted to bring it with me—to learn more and to feel closer to the place I’m from.
P: Did it make you feel more connected to Kobe?
S: Yes, a little. My parents weren’t from Kobe, and my Okinawan name sounded strange there. People always ask, “Where are you from?” I think learning about octopus made me feel more local.
P: That makes sense. Do you see the octopus as a collaborator?
S: Well, I don’t say collaborator, but I feel like it was a friend in a sense. You know? I released it back to the sea, I couldn’t eat it. I imagined it telling the others underwater about its strange experience with a human—like someone telling a story about being captured by aliens.
P: That’s great. In a lot of your works, humans, animals, and objects seem to exist on the same level, as if they share equal importance.
S: The biggest boundary is between myself and everything else. Everything beyond me—humans, animals, objects—is kind of equal. I don’t feel the hierarchy that people usually make. I just try to be kind to all of them.
P: There are a lot of Indigenous worldviews that align with what you’re saying—that humans are no greater than any other species, that everybody is equal.
S: Yeah, yeah, yeah! It started to change. I think Western people have started to change, especially in Europe, you know, they started to think differently from before. So even when you ask such a question, maybe you start to think about it. Right? Sure. So that’s very good. I like it.
P: Much of your work happens outside, in public or in nature. What draws you to working in those kinds of spaces?
S: A studio costs money! (laughs) When I started, I didn’t have one, so I worked outside. But also, I grew up between the mountains and the sea, so being outdoors feels normal to me.
Wherever I live—Kobe, Okinawa, even Berlin—I always look for a mountain and a sea. Those two things are important.
P: You’ve moved many times and travel for projects. How do you approach new places when you arrive? How do you think about the people that live in those locations?
S: Usually, a museum or curator invites me, and we walk around together. I ask many questions—especially about food. Food reflects culture and history, so it’s a good way to know a place.
I never read guidebooks. I don’t want stereotypes. I’m not afraid of misunderstanding. Sometimes, a beautiful misunderstanding is better than a good understanding.
P: That’s a lovely idea—“beautiful misunderstanding.”
S: So I think artwork is like a beautiful misunderstanding or it could be said, my personal understanding. So I just try to see, try to understand by myself.
When you come from outside, you can see things in another way. That’s the good thing about being a stranger. I think that’s why I’m invited to different places—to find things local people don’t notice in the same way.
P: Your Fish and Chips project in London comes to mind. You filmed a fish following a potato in the ocean. I wonder how many Brits have considered a potato and fish in the sea together. Chippies are so common in London, it’s a very ordinary dish.
S: It’s too, too normal for them. So, you know, they never thought, “that’s a strange mix”, you know?
P: How do you know when something becomes art? Does it matter to call it art?
S: Well, that was fun. If it’s fun, I think it’s artwork, right? Yeah. If it is boring, I mean, there are many artworks that are boring. I love art and always want to make great art. But many things that look like art are not really art. The world is full of things that pretend to be art—paint on a canvas, for example.
For me, art is something that makes the heart dance. If it makes my heart move fast, that’s art. If it’s boring, maybe it only looks like art. So I follow what makes me excited. Sometimes, the works I’m unsure about—the ones where I think, “Will this even be a piece?”—end up being the best ones.
So for me, any form, any things, even dog swimming competitions, you know, if it makes you happy or it’s behaving like that— maybe that’s it.
P: So your definition is if it makes you happy?
S: Yeah, or it makes my heart dance fast.
P: So are you looking for an emotional response?
S: Mm-hmm. I often say art is not things to understand only. Many people in contemporary art today think that things are made to understand. Right? But sometimes you don’t have to understand. You just feel it or you just laugh about it.
P: Yes, I hear that too—it’s common for people to not “understand” art. It becomes a barrier to experience it. Especially in the West, in America, we get so cerebral and assume that we have to figure it out. Do you find that to be true in other places you’ve lived?
S: Well, of course. I mean, when I was in Berlin, I had a hard time because they didn’t like what I was doing so much. So I didn’t have many chances to show my work there, but it was a good place to live. You know, it was cheaper than other cities. Economically, Berlin was a good place to live.
You know, the West—part of America—is very much about understanding and things like American pop culture. It helped me a lot. I went to San Francisco because of this hippie movement. The Beats helped a lot too.
The West Coast of America? I like it. Especially San Francisco, Los Angeles—you know? They know how to enjoy life.
P: How so?
S: They had humor. They didn’t take things too seriously. They were reaching for something they didn’t know, without worrying about the goal. I like that approach.
P: Like your work, which is very open to chance. Such as the Dog Competition [Swansea Jack Memorial Dog Swimming Competition]. How do you balance your own ideas with what happens unexpectedly?
S: My work isn’t about showing what I’m good at. It’s about challenging myself to do what I couldn’t do before. That means I naturally collaborate—with people, with the world, with accidents. It’s like walking down an alley without knowing where it goes. That’s the fun part.
P: You’ve lived in Kobe, Berlin, and now Okinawa. How have these environments shaped your way of thinking?
S: Each place has different light, air, and rhythm. Kobe and Okinawa both have the sea and mountains. Berlin doesn’t. Its streets are straight—Japanese streets twist. These things influence how you think.
But maybe more than that, I’ve always been a stranger. Even in Kobe, people asked where I was from. In Berlin, of course, I was a foreigner. In Okinawa, my accent sounds like a tourist. So maybe location doesn’t matter—I’m always a stranger.
P: What have you been curious about lately?
S: Baseball. (laughs) You should watch more sports.
P: Why?
S: I think artists should watch more sports. Athletes have a completely different sense of space. Many artists move slowly—or not at all. But in sports, everything moves fast. They have this ability to know where everyone is without looking.
I find that way of seeing very interesting. I want to collaborate with them someday.
P: That’s unexpected, but it makes sense—the movement, the awareness.
S: Yes. I especially like watching Shohei Ohtani. His performances lift our spirits in this gloomy world. In that sense, he’s a true artist.
P: It goes back to your definition of art: it must make your heart dance..
S: Yes. You should watch. It’s starting tomorrow.
Peery Sloan (she/her) likes to dig—sometimes literally—to see what’s beneath the surface: worms, bones, histories, the things we’ve learned not to notice. Her practice asks how art might collapse into daily life, and what gets unearthed when it does.
Shimabuku: Born in Kobe, Japan 1969 Lives in Naha, Japan
After living in Berlin, Germany for 12 years, Shimabuku moved to Naha, Okinawa, Japan in 2016 where he is currently based.
From the beginning of the 1990s, he has travelled to various places in Japan and overseas, creating performances and installations that consider the daily lives and cultures of people he encounters, as well as new forms of communication. He also works in a diverse range of media including sculpture, film and photography. Full of poetic sentiment and humor while also inspiring people in metaphorical ways, his style has gained a worldwide reputation.