49
By Kevin Phan
Inkjet prints on time cards, family photo archive, 24.5” x 63” (2024)
With this diptych, I employ the time card as a means to confront the expendable and interchangeable Asian laborer in America. In 49, I explore my ancestors’ histories as laborers through our archive of family home videos and photos. Using the family archive and the time card, I compose two spectral figures. These ‘ghosts’ address the abstract and concrete losses that haunt the landscape of Asian America. For the sake of accumulating capital, Western hegemony is more than willing to render Asian Americans as subservient workers, as assimilated objects, and as ghosts on the margins of the White American center.
Kevin Quang Phan (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He earned his BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2020 and his MFA in Photo/Media at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2024. His work addresses the illegibility of Asians in the White supremacist state and how modes of illegibility can be used to reject homogeneity and push for Asian American autonomy and agency.