mirage authenticity
Yoga W.
Oil Paint on Wood
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During a Chinatown field trip for my English class last year, our tour guide told us the iconic architecture that lined the Chinatown streets was modeled after the mere idea of Chineseness, a marketing tourist trap designed in the image of China to a white state. I wonder, sometimes, how I, Chinese and learning to be so under an American government, might be any different. This piece is a simultaneous love letter to and critique of authenticity; after all, amidst the tourist trap architecture are real Chinese people and exports and community, old ladies wheeling carts of groceries and lacquered wooden boxes and plasticky trinkets. I am authentically myself and inauthentically Chinese, and maybe more alive for it.
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Creativity and subsequently, art itself, give people reason to live. As a capitalistic society, we often value production, so-called "usefulness" above all else, but art imagines a world beyond capital, a world that encompasses all the care and connection we are capable of.
