For my final design, I related the work to my obsession, Homelessness. I wanted to encapsulate the traumatic journey into a live performance piece because I believed that showing the feeling of hopelessness would be best represented through the fluidity of the body. I expressed my experience through Korean side dishes because in the most dire situations, I would understand when it was getting worse by the disappearance of the side dishes. Korean side dishes are expensive and are considered a privilege. On the American flag, I wrote the names of homeless people that died in Orange County, California, and free wrote on a portion of the flag relating to my experience of homelessness. I shredded and cut the flag because my intention in this piece was to expose America’s institution that sets low-income, homeless, and impoverished people up for failure. For my outfit in the piece, I wanted to wear red pants to symbolize wealth in Asian culture, and wore a rainbow shirt to symbolize my queer identity. Usually outfits like these, you would not suspect the person to be suffering homelessness. In my performance piece, I will wear a shredded American flag over my face to represent the suffocating and hopeless feeling that America will never truly see me as a human being that needs help. Often times when we witness homeless people, we reduce them as alcoholics or drug addicts and we use that excuse to justify our actions to not reach out and help them. It was a liberating feeling shredding the flags, focusing on my anger and frustrations on this piece of fabric that is supposed to represent ‘America’, and using my power to destroy it, to colonize over it.
During my research for Seminar, I was influenced by the idea that colonization disproportionately affects minorities in America. When I wrote down the names of the victims, I kept in mind how many minorities died versus white people. It was a drastic difference from each other. While I researched racial disparities in homelessness, Black and Indeginious people suffer the worst consequences because of the history of colonization. While I am still racially profiled, I have a certain degree of privilege that allows me to have an upper hand in any situation versus my black or indeginious counterparts. By participating in this research process, it changes my mindset to not focus on the piece specifically on me, but for everyone that has died due to the lack of help. This project is not about me, but for Armando Villa, Phunyouphone Kanyavong, Chinh Nguyen, for all of us.
