Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin presented solo exhibition Like Water and Oil Never Assimilating at New York’s AC Institute, which opened September 8 and ran to October 6.
The Korean/American/Canadian artist and curator presented an installation that explores “the history of Asian American identity through the lens of anti-Asian and Yellow Peril journalism.” Looking at boundaries, erasure, formation and identity, her work deconstructs the colonized body to break down how and what we inherit and become conditioned by.
The title is a fragment from a piece of text, which narrates the memory of receiving a package from Korea every six months from her mother, where the artists drinks “한약” and imagines “the sourness dampening the lining of my gastric mucosa and breaking up that year’s build up of white toxicity. Why is it that my identity is hinged on immiscibility, like water and oil never assimilating? Yes, it’s me, it’s clear that my own invisibility is the problem.”**