You Tell Me

Suyang Gong

I have been mulling recently over my parents’ old family photos, which they brought over when they immigrated from China, primarily for the ways in which they both convey and withhold information. Obviously my parents can read them without issue, but I’m caught by how I know that they’re important while also feeling completely divorced from the photos as family history and as my personal identity. Who were these people, where were they, and what were they doing? The photo’s existence means there are answers, but I can’t tease them out, and so the photos become more significant as objects rather than images. They force me to consider how my family history — my Chinese-ness, my relationship to the language — factor into my sense of self.

My drawings and paintings form my examination into this strange relationship between the photo, my family, my cultural heritage, and myself. These ideas are more literal in some works than others, but this line from family to self is the binding thread.

All Small drawings Paintings Large drawing

Email: gong.suyang@gmail.com

Instagram: kitcat_pls

< back to map

Suyang Gong

Bent Corner, graphite on paper, 9/30/20, 9” x 6”.

Wavy Edge, graphite on paper, 10/2/20, 9” x 6”

Without fluency in Mandarin, I am cut off from my family, their history, their culture, and everything of theirs that should, in some way, be mine, form a part of me. What I have left are photos of them. Yet the people in the photos convey nothing. Who were they? What were their names? How did they talk? What did they like? They tell me nothing about the subject, and therefore nothing about myself. But even so I can’t toss them out. More connected, more tangled, the modern experience requires establishing an identity, and to establish an identity, one must apply the appropriate labels. Yet they are not always applied with one’s consent, nor are they always completely applicable. I am Chinese, but also not really. But that part of me was taken away gently. How do others in more complicated situations than my own reconcile their identities? Identity shifts in response to the people and culture around us, and as more people move, travel, migrate, flee, they must rebuild who they are. How does personal history,or lack thereof, inform that shift? How does language create access to that history?