Two months since Christina Yuna Lee was brutally killed in her New York Chinatown apartment, family and friends are finding new ways to pay tribute to her life.
Courtesy David Lah/Phil Cai/Eli Klein Gallery
Sifting through archival footage filmed by US and Australian soldiers in Vietnam during the late 1960s and early '70s, Trương finds the moments in which the soldiers' gaze fixates on Vietnamese women and creates stills of them. The work is personal -- her mother would have been in her late teens and early 20s at the time. But by divorcing the images from the context in which they were filmed, Trương attempts to give the nameless women a chance at autonomy and newfound possibility.
As visitors move through the exhibition, they eventually come to a painting by Lee, depicting the Chinese cigarette brand Golden Bridge, detailed with gold leaf. She had made the work for Klein around the time she left the gallery, a nod to her boss' former smoking habit and to the Chinese practice of gifting cigarettes
"Asian people are expected to dull their emotions in this country and be perceived as pleasant," said huang, who opts to lowercase their name to keep the emphasis on the art."To be pleasant all the time means that you cannot grieve all the time. And I think it's resulted in a lot of unprocessed grieving. Reminding ourselves to return to the grieving processes that our ancestors engaged in feels right at this time.