Finally . . . here's mine

Hi all,

I'm the last one to post this info! (Good thing Julie set a good example by going first, to balance things out among the profs!)

Here's the email I sent to Sunni:

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Dear Sunni:

Oh this is so *interestingly* tough!

I'm finally going to commit to one project but there is now at least one other that I plan to do later, when research time allows.

I realize I'm sending this rather late in the game, so if you don't have time to respond I understand. (Especially since we're now looking at 8 projects instead of the 4 or 5 we originally expected to arise from the class!)

Anyhoo, here's mine:

My site is underground Chinatown and I've been thinking about various ways to represent its invisibility and to raise the question of what we miss when we choose not to see a community or when we choose not to inquire into one (as seems to have been the case with the Chinese immigrants of that era: the legends persisted for years but clues were ignored or vanished from public memory).

I hate to be too literal or too obvious, but I'm leaning toward using an egg as my vessel and modeling the project roughly after those sugared Victorian-era diorama eggs. To follow this path I'd make a rather large egg--probably balloon size--from papier mache. There'd be a peephole with a door that opens and closes. (Some newspaper accounts of the Chinese underground mention a door (blue or green) marking one entrance to it.) The exterior of the egg would have the appearance of concrete--making it invisible all but for the discrete door.

The interior walls of the egg would be red tissue paper--glued shreds of firecracker paper (remnants of the recent lunar new year celebrations here).

My diorama would be bits of Chinese immigrant culture: photocopied artifacts from the one (ONLY ONE!) box archived at the History Center belonging to a Chinese merchant of that era. I can't confirm whether this man actually occupied one of the storefronts or residences connected to the underground, but then again that's part of what makes this project so revealing to me as I work on it. The artifacts I photocopied were: a photo (probably of his wife), a couple of personal letters, an envelope, and a deed to some land in Texas.

I'm sort of tempted to also include a miniature statue of a Chinese longevity god because it relates to one of the other nearly invisible Chinese immigrant communities reported in the Daily Oklahoman in Luther, OK (the statue was found buried there).

The symbolism of the egg--again, too obvious?--relates to its fragility and stability, also of course its fertility-symbolism (less interesting to me but arguably interesting given the fertile contributions made by Chinese immigrants to Oklahoma. Honestly, what I like best about the egg is a personal connection: as a very little girl I had three or so of those Victorian eggs in my nursery and they were a source of wonder. They seemed like gateways to another world, which is what that doorway to underground Chinatown could have been to more people, and was to some. (For my future project I'd like to research Mayor Shirk's journals to glimpse his inner struggle with the decision to neglect preservation of that area. So, admittedly, one of the people implied by the egg's peephole is Shirk himself.)

As for assembly: I figured a balloon and mod podge would enable me to make the egg. Then I'd need to slice it open discreetly with an exacto-knife to give me access to the interior. Perhaps I'd make a second layer of mod podge after completing the interior in order to re-seal the outside. I could use something like drywall spackle to give the exterior a concrete texture or maybe just spray it with a can of that fleckstone paint in a grayish hue. Not sure how to affix a door. I'd like it to be hinged, though, so when the piece is displayed it can be partially open, giving the viewer the option of ignoring it or looking inside.

Of all of the above I'm perhaps least sure of the diorama. My desire is not to make the interior as literal as it is currently described. I'm still pondering the kinds of images or objects to include there.

Thanks again for sharing so much time and talent with our class. This is an extraordinary experience.

Brooke

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--> I sent Sunni a follow-up/revision regarding my project:

I'm thinking that inside the egg the 'diorama' shouldn't be lots of things but instead maybe just one thing: a simple wooden box, perhaps with an open lid. I might write the Mandarin character for "remember" or "memory" on the front of the box. (I'm a novice student of oriental brush-block painting so the character wouldn't be perfectly shaped but at least I have the tools and the basic knowledge to make it.)

Inside the box I could still place a few of the photocopied objects from the lone archival box belonging to the Chinese merchant. But the viewer could neither see nor access these objects because the peephole would be too small and distant.

This would be a more accurate representation of my perspective, and it would still (to me, anyway) imply both Shirk and the OKC public as viewers of that distant and somewhat inaccessible history.







Image source for the Victorian sugar egg w/diorama: ebay