Culture as a Choice is a series of works that questions what it means to live in America where all different ethnic origins and backgrounds exist together.
Title: Why is Twinkie so Funny?
Twinkie and banana are the terms that make fun of Asian American. Both twinkie and banana are yellow outside, which indicates “Asian” and white inside, which indicates “Caucasian” outside. These terms reveal that people think race represents culture.
Justin is a Korean American. In this video, I as an interviewer treat him based on his race. The questions I ask are deeply involved in political and social issues in South Korea, which is difficult to answer for non-Korean.
Title: Violent Concern
*These are the screenshots from the performance video.
Lauren, who is sitting on the table, once lived in Japan. She appreciates Japanese culture and acknowledges it as a part of her identity. In this performance, a server intentionally treats her in a cultural manner based on her race. The server gives her knife and fork instead of chopsticks and puts barbeque sauce, mustard and pepper sauce close to her, but soy sauce far from her. She uses a fork and knife upside down, so that it can function as chopsticks.
As an artist, I intend to point out how identifying race as an indication of culture can cause a violent action.
Life as an Object
A Google Chrome browser extension that replaces prices on Amazon with the time it would take to earn the equivalent monetary amount making minimum wage.
This computer program detects users’ location and calculates how much time it takes with the minimum wage in the state. For example, if the price of the object is $20, it shows up as 2.5 hours in California ($8/hour), but 2.2 hours in Oregon ($9.10/hour)
This project is a collaboration with artist Brannon Dorsey, You can also download this extension for free on this link, and see time instead of price: https://github.com/brannondorsey/minimumwage
