This room shown above was hidden as a back space of a venue until a previous year and had gone through a modification process to make use of it. I viewed the renovation for a year and studied the building built in 1914 (opened in 1915). I have been interested in the connection between the city of San Francisco (“mulberry port” 桑港) and my maternal family’s city of Hachioji, Japan (“mulberry city” 桑都). In Hachioji, I studied my family’s home shortly before it left us. hands on tape was presented right before The Lab finally went into a temporary closure to demolish and move the wall in between this backroom and the main event room to make the space larger. 

Renovation and demolishing being the theme of the site, I focused on hidden stories and hidden spaces, and scars—scars that are physical, psychological, and intergenerational.

I made 445 moths out of screen paper owned by my great grandmother as if I transform endurance—such as endurance by her and in my family members, women thread makers, and silkworms.

Upon the mending/painting work by Anthony Russell, I saw plasters, mixtures of materials, as fibers, and mending as a surgery. Looking at old pipes in the holes on the wall as if they were old veins and stains on the floor as if they were engraved on skins, I viewed the building as a body, going through many surgeries historically for people to continue to use the building. I collected plasters that came off from the mending and laid 445 of them, the same number as the paper moths flying above the plasters.

I remember, after having a third surgery due to genetic traits and having had the chance to look at a photo of my objects laid out neatly in a spiral shape for a medical/scholarly report by the surgeon, I felt I was able to see them because I had the surgery, and somehow understood that they would fly someday like dreams or dusts. I laid the plasters in the same spiral shape from larger ones to smaller ones.

Beneath them are scraps of kimono cloth which my great grandmother had collected after mending her kimono and her family’s, mostly work clothes. Plasters cannot be burnt unlike organic objects. We can’t take any physical things with us at the end but something stays, like plasters, such as stories that are waiting to be acknowledged, or stories ungraspable. Does metamorphosis of them happen?

This section consisted of my family’s archival materials and newspaper in SF. Cloth on the floor was my grandfather’s cloth bag, wrapping war-time textbooks and photos. I expressed regret by throwing it with stones.

In one of performances, I collaborated with violinist Hyeyung Sol Yoon—we breathed together with our ancestors to acknowledge wounds.

I lighted holes in the wall with lights inside them upon the opening. Captions around this area included below.

Labor Clarion (Feb. 26, 1915)

"In the first decade of the twentieth century, Labor Clarion, the Labor Council's official weekly publication, periodically presented organizational reports and persuasive essays that developed the conceptual and practical agenda of buy-the-union-label efforts. The Clarion maintained an anti-Asian-immigration stance throughout the first third of the twentieth century." 

(Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown)

   Courtesy: San Francisco State University, Special Collection

Silk thread-making tool (est. 1890s-1930s) (not shown in the above photo)

Raw silk trade was one of the national policies Japan took to enrich the country and strengthen the armed forces. Some of the influential silk global products were stockings and parachutes. “Silk trains” ran from SF, Seatle/Tacoma and Vancouver to NYC.