Nov 20: Tonight We Go To Sleep and Tomorrow We Begin to Change Forever uses the visual language of artifactual photography in permanent collections to draw a comparison between the displacement and commodification of children’s bodies through foreign adoption and that of other cultures, typically those of the Global South, by Western institutional archives through their collection and acquisition of foreign artifacts. 

This work considers how many of the cultural artifacts in museums are quite ordinary when removed from the context of their institutions: bowls, spoons, tools, etc. They were once used and served a purpose within the day to day lives of those the families and communities they belonged to. Through invasion, excavation, and extraction they have been gradually moved and dispersed across the globe, now placed behind glass on pristine white pedestals. This method of presentation encourages a passive consumption of culture—one that privileges observation over engagement, and ownership over understanding. 

The objects depicted are my personal belongings from when my parents were adopting me. Like cultural artifacts, many of these objects are quite mundane and ordinary, such as journals, Chinese bandaids from 2004, and news cut outs. However, by photographing them in this way, I create this comparison between their history tied to my adoption and institutional collections. Like these artifacts, transnational adoptees are uprooted and displaced from their home lands, as children, and relocated to predominantly white countries, often due to geopolitical circumstances that extend far beyond them.
This project also reflects on the idea of provenance, and how both cultural artifacts and adoptees often lack documentation of their history and movement. Documentation is fragmented, fabricated, or absent entirely. For museums, this stems from the colonial impulse to claim rather than understand. For adoptees, histories are often rewritten by the governments and agencies that facilitated our movement. In both cases, records are shaped to fit institutional needs more than individual truths.

These belongings photographed are my documents, my archive. They have been carefully collected and preserved by my parents throughout my childhood. This archive represents both my parents’ effort to honor the complexity of my origins and my own attempt to reconstruct and understand them. It affirms not just my history, but my presence and my being as something worth preserving.

Ultimately, this work is positioned between my complicated feelings that are caught between deconstructing colonialism on a broad level and feeling very sentimental towards the subject on a more personal level.