Tseng Kwong Chi Posing with Mannequins, from the series Costumes at the Met

Curator Tour: Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts – Institutions Critiqued

One Book One Northwestern, 2023–24

A photographer and performance artist, Tseng Kwong Chi used his art to play with self-representation and to question cultural assumptions. A Hong Kong-born artist based in New York, Tseng attended the Met Gala in 1980 as part of an assignment as reporter-photographer for the Soho Weekly News and used the occasion to take photographs with many famous attendees. Here Tseng documents himself posing in front of a mannequin displaying a costume as part of the exhibition The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of the Ch’ing Dynasty, 1644–1912. Tseng intentionally and awkwardly imitates the contrived pose of the mannequin, perhaps calling attention to how Asian people are perceived of as exotic in the United States. His worker’s jacket contrasted with the lavish gowns of the other attendees, many of whom wore Asian-themed apparel that expose a tendency to flatten and appropriate other cultures.

In Crying in H Mart, Zauner explains how it felt growing up at a time when there was not a lot of nuance regarding cultural identity and with others trying to categorize her based on her appearance. She writes, “In Eugene, [Oregon] I was one of a few mixed-race kids at my school and most people thought of me as Asian. I felt awkward and undesirable, and no one complimented my appearance. In Seoul, most Koreans assumed I was Caucasian, until my mother stood beside me and they could see the half of her fused to me, and I made sense.”