From The Archives: I (2017)

I was developed during what I would consider to be the beginning of my transformation into the artist I am today. Up until the year 2016, I had just been making images admittedly without much thought, China and by extension, Asia were so new to me. Never in my wildest fantasies did I imagine I would see, let alone live in a place like Shanghai, with its smog-filled science fiction-esque level of existence.

Then there was the fact that even though I’d been making images for a little over five years by this time, I still viewed myself the same as when I had begun. I still, desperately wanted to be a street photographer - and thought of myself exclusively as one. However, the problem with this frame of thought was that it paid no respect to my personal and artistic evolution.

From traveling to Italy to my home in New York to Tokyo and back, to meeting and becoming friends with Uyghur peoples through the Huxi Mosque and furthering my interests in areas such as gestalt psychology, etymologies, mythology, ongoing global socio-political conflict, and more, I came to this realization that even if I wasn’t interested in focusing on more than what was in front of me, or as I would often say “the next 24 hours”, I needed to do more. And I was obligated to.

“How can I demonstrate the evolution of my worldview?” I thought. Singular images were not enough, and I had no interest in exhibiting photo work in a gallery or art space; not that anyone was looking. So I looked inward, and into the past, to my childhood. In my youth, I discovered artists through the mixtape. You could go to a spot, pick up a tape, and usually if you bought one, they’d add another tape or music-related video series such as Smack DVD or Cocaine City in for free. I didn’t understand the use of this then, but now living in China, a place where there was a government ministry whose sole responsibility was to “promote and protect the arts” and being a part of an art collective where our every action was monitored, this guerilla tactic made crystal clear sense.

What is a mixtape for a photographer? It is a book. a small one, but a book. I’d never designed one. I thought photo books were something that a gallery, publisher, or some other business made for you - I was naive like that back then. It was probably good that I thought this way though, because I am incredibly stubborn, and if I see barriers I often try to blow past them. And thus began the development of my first book. Some would call this undertaking a “zine”, but I reject this idea. I think the term zine underrates book-based art. There are books, journals, and magazines, regardless of page count, materials used to print, or binding choice they are different.

The sequencing of the book would be simple, behind the theme of “new world, new mythologies”, I would subtly showcase the change in my life. Presenting the viewer a sequence that shows glimpses into day-to-day life in Shanghai, suggesting new threads of personal and observed mythologies, and laying bare themes that would and still do follow my journey in my practice.

The book was made, but not in the way most would think. Only one physical copy of this book ever existed (the proof of the book), the rest of its other “copies” were disseminated through digital apparatuses such as The Pirate Bay, my then digital publishing platform Durendal, and by USB sharing with trusted friends. I wanted to subvert censorship, and Chinese monitoring, while also making it possible for the work to extend beyond the Great Firewall. The only way to do this was through the use of anonymizing software such as Tor, DuckDuckGo, and Brave, working in concert with Virtual Private Networks (my favorite one was called PandaPow).

Through this effort I and its follow-up II ( the subject of the next From The Archives dispatch) were able to reach several continents, securing thousands of downloads and comments before I erased the book from file-sharing sites. Though my practice has since evolved, I am still so fond of this work. It changed my outlook on my practice and most importantly, created a new space for me to create.