Upending the Melting Pot: Photography, Performativity, and Immigration Re-Imagined in the Self-Portraits of Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

Abstract

Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew each employ our associations with photography, performativity, and self-portraiture to compel us to re-examine our views of immigrants and immigration and bring them up-to-date. Originally created with predominantly white European newcomers in mind, traditional assimilative narratives have little in common with the experience of immigrants of color for whom “blending in” with “white mainstream America” is not an option. Through self-portraiture, then, Tseng, Lee, and Matthew significantly confront the issue of the “raced body” directly, such that their work reveals as much about their adoptive country’s attitudes towards each artist’s perceived group—Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian—as the individuals themselves. In approaching their imagery as case studies of the contemporary immigrant experience, this dissertation argues that Tseng’s East Meets West (1979-89), Lee’s Projects (1997-2001), and Matthew’s An Indian from India (2001-07) share affinities with trends in contemporary literature in that the three artists’ self-portraits, like the writings of their author counterparts make a claim for the immigrant’s rightful place within the U.S. The first chapter contextualizes the three artists’ series by providing an overview of the history of Asian immigration in the United States. Each of the subsequent chapters explores one of the photographic series of interest, beginning with Tseng’s East Meets West; this chapter delves into the intersectionality of identity, by looking at how the artist cleverly employs Western stereotypes of the “inscrutable Chinese” to promote a worldview in which is is regarded as an artist first, gay Asian man second. Amongst Lee’s larger photographic series, her Schoolgirls and Young Japanese (East Village) Projects have been paid little scholarly attention. By addressing this lacuna in the third chapter, this dissertation claims that the the two “subprojects” play a key role in understanding Lee’s Projects as a whole. The fourth and final chapter looks to Matthew’s An Indian From India as providing the most “personal” glimpse into the immigrant experience by noting her use of audiences’ associations with nineteenth-century portraiture of Native Americans to affirm her South Asian Indian identity within the U.S.