Imitation of Life is an installation that dissects the popular racist schoolchildren rhyme, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these” photographically and textually to comment on racial stereotyping. Based loosely on the Douglas Sirk melodrama of the same name, this work consists of two sets of twelve black and white photographs depicting mimicked exoticized Asian facial characteristics through sexual innuendo and accompanying text, framed excerpts in print researched from anthropological textbooks about taboo Asian cuisine, divided into four groups. Each group features the same Caucasian adult male, female, and young male child reenacting a single section of the rhyme. The textual passages are reedited to approximate a “fortune cookie saying” grammatical style associated with how Asians are perceived to speak. Viewed as a whole, these sections resemble the syntactical structure that forms a sort of “visual sentence” in conjunction with the actual food text. A similarly framed mirror and blank sheet of paper positioned on the opposite wall faces the main body of this piece.
What this work intends to project is a flux of language as visual information depicting pictorial image versus text per se as typographical element to reinforce prejudiced notions of perception. To see without hearing the rhyme refers to learning by rote, sometimes an oral tradition alluding to repeating gestures passed on from generation to culture to generation. This notion relates to how the food text centers on perceptions of how printed information becomes the accepted norm as a single version of the truth or represented truisms. Showing scientifically, or medically, supported statements to validate Asian cooking and eating habits within this work questions the whole idea of what is taboo food and consequently who determines what are the systems of standards used to judge acceptable from unacceptable. To perpetuate a negative stereotype is a guerrilla tactic to compare the equal absurdity in the racism of these particular images and text.