“The boat has…been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present…the greatest reserve of the imagination." - Michel Foucault
I filled a WW2-era museum steamship with over sixty illuminated drawings and video mapping projections of fish that can be found from my grandmother’s fishing village, Success, in Taiwan to the corners of Austronesia. The drawings of the fish were based on the research of a marine biologist from Success. Meandering through the ship, one would encounter projections of Pacific marine life mapped onto portholes and below water level chambers with footage that I shot and then mapped with art programmer Matt Romein. I also juxtaposed the colonial aesthetics of botanical expeditions with contemporaneous Austronesian navigation stick charts and dugout canoes to question notions of cultural hierarchy.
In addition, I also curated 3 evenings of performance on the Aquarium from Austronesia that featured new work and improvisations by Angelica Negron’s musical ensemble Arturo en el Barco, Masami Tomihisa and musicians, Peptalk (Preshish Moments and Shayna Dunkleman), Chuck Bettis presenting Silver Process, and conceptual butoh performance by Sindy Butz.
I created sixty illuminated paper mache drawings of fish that populate Austronesian waters from my grandmother’s village to Honolulu and interspersed them throughout the ship as metaphors for interconnectivity that conjoin continents to continents, islands to islands, and cultures to cultures.
Beatrice Glow, Aquarium from Austronesia installation view, 2012, Illuminated paper mache drawing, 18 in. x 30 in. x 5 in., 45.72 cm x 76.2 cm x 12.7 cm
collaboration with Matt Romein
collaboration with Matt Romein
Collaboration with Matt Romein
Collaboration with Matt Romein
Collaboration with Matt Romein
Collaboration with Matt Romein
Engine Room
Engine Room
Special Thanks to the Generous Support of: The Lilac Preservation Project and its Museum Director, Mary Habstritt; Steve Macfarlane, The Special Consultant; Gerry Weinstein; David Hodgson; Problem Solver Reid Bingham; Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics; Wei-Chuan Chiang “Riyar” at the Fisheries Research Institute, COA; John Zorn; Anne and Andy Guo; Jeremiah Cymerman; Joaquin Goldstein of ZonaTreinta; Mauricio Montesinos; Christina Sun; Sean Galagan; Helaine Gawlica; Justin Warsh; Benjamin Lundberg.