The Asian Literature Photo Project

Photos by:
Top: Kristina Miyasaki, Jeff Hui, Daniel Ehrenworth
Middle: Daniel Shipp, Annie Cheung, Tesfi
Bottom: Kavin W, Siya Chen, Steve Stober

For the majority of my university career, I religiously took enviro-related geography related courses. I had wanted to combine my knowledge in industrial engineering and the potential knowledge from my geography classes to eventually learn to optimize what I then thought to be expensive environmental technology. I realized that these courses don’t actually have a lot to offer me when I wrote about net-zero technology issues for a upper level class and I got a low mark because the prof was not up to date on these issues and essentially thought I was writing the script for Space Odyssey II. I had my mark upgraded after he read my resources. My other engineering friends in the class, who wrote about the usual pap about trees, carbon sinks and recycling technology that is so 20 years ago, all had a good laugh.

Since the amount of enviro-geographic information I could learn with Ryerson electives has plateaued, I decided to take English for my last elective. I’m painfully out of practice and out of date in terms of my writing skills. I’ve only taken a requisite tech communication class in university and I thought it was difficult. I’m awfully embarassed of my crap writing but there was a new Asian Lit class at Ryerson that looked really interesting so I decided to try it out.

Taking this class was like coming home after being away and then remembering why you left in the first place 30 s after you walk in the door. The professor was terrific but the people in the class, mostly first or 1.5 generation Asian immigrants, were all struggling to understand their own personal diaspora stories. There were a lot of off-topic discussions of Chinese-Japanese relations, plastic surgery, Beijing Olympics, and the contradictions of the Canadian narrative.

I think one of the most involved topics was interracial relationships, more specifically relationships between Asian females and Caucausian males. This was mentioned at least 2-3 times each class whether the topic being discussed called for it and it seemed like even the most liberal of the Asian men on my class were against it. The most outspoken of the Asian men in the class were against miscongenation, saying that all interracial relationships are due to the exotified image of Asian women and therefore not able to be true, mutrally respectful relationships. I didn’t think that it was a fair statement to make as it has the underlying assumptions that all Asian women are unable to handle their own sexuality and make healthy relationship choices and that all Caucausian men are unable to or do not want to sustain equal relationships. It seems like there is a progression from the fear of being overly hated to the fear of overly loved. It is certainly awkward to sit through these discussions because the women in the class do not speak up even though a good half of them were in or were the results of interracial relationships. Nobody questioned these men out loud.

Stereotypes are a funny thing. They provide a counter-narrative to an imaginary point of identity in excess of what can be empirically proved for the stereotyper and removes the right of the steretypee to have an individualistic story free of a simplified narrative of a cultural zone. Certaintly, Asians in Canada had their fairshare of being discriminated against and stereotyped and a google search of “asian women” brings up sexy girls in bikinis and cosplay, however, I do not think that this should condone the reverse assumption that all people other than Asians are inherently objectifiers of Asian women. I wanted to explore the meta-stereotype of the sexualized Asian female.

I sent out an open call to photographers who were my friends and created a post on Craigslist saying roughly this:

Hey X!

I’m doing an Asian study class in school. I’m doing a project on the perception of Asian women by various groups of people (by sex/age/race/religion). I’m wondering if you’ll like to be involved. What I’ll need you to do is shoot me using your honest perception of me whether it has anything to do with race or not. You can style me with any clothes and props you like that would help communicate your image of me.

You’ll need to sign a release allowing me to use this for academic study. I would like to shoot in Feb if you can! it’s really something small.. most people send 1 hour on it

Tell me what you think!

Thanks!
R

In total 9 people participated in my project. I knew 5 of the photographers personally and met Steve, Daniel Shipp, Daniel Ehrenworth and Annie on set. The subgroups were three white males, one black male, two Asian males and three Asian females. I attempted to get other subgroups involved but I got no responses. All of the male participants were professional photographers. It is hard to find professional female photographers.

There were many limitations to my project. Firstly, these people were self selected for my project. There was an immediate population selection bias based on the way my request was phrased and the people it reached (either people I am already friends with or CL people). Photographers that are wary of being perceived, well, anything at all, would have shied away from participating in my project. So really, I’m left with people I’m friends with, that owes me favours, have nothing to hide or are able to adequately self-censor. I’m obviously not getting into the nitty-gritty of Asianploitation-ness if there was potential for some. Also, I’m missing representative views from white and black women.

Some things I personally found interesting is that only the Asian female photographers made some effort to portray me as a part of a community or as someone that is confident. The class did agree that all of the pictures except one were non-exploitive, however, it did not seem concrete enough to truly change people’s minds. Some interesting points the class made were that the pictures produced by white male photographers were all pyschological. A classmate (white, female if it matters) in Image Arts pointed out that if she was to do this project, she would have tried to do the same to avoid racial topics. Another (female, South Asian) classmate pointed out that the Asian male photographers didn’t seem to take either myself or my project seriously. I think the best point made in the class was that these were not pictures to sell me or my Asian-ness and therefore could not be comparable to the pictures from the google search.

Overall, I thought the project was fun. I would had like to do more pictures to get a greater sample size but I didn’t have time to due to time constraints. I met really fun people in the process and got some interesting shots for the ol’ scrapbook. Ideally, I would be able to show a whole series to a gallery.

Another notable submission for the project was a particularly talented short movie on the Japanese invasion of the Pacific Rim. I give it A+ for effort and the facts are in line with Iris Chang’s book but the biased tone of the videos make them hard to watch.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3