Photo of gallery view by Steffen Allen

: : Corona Mestiza : :

Corona Mestiza (2011) is a CT-scan portrait poem about my father. Understanding a personal narrative can parallel the process of deciphering medical data, which is deeply intimate, yet mysterious and sometimes hard to translate. The lesions in this "brain" are based on a map of the Philippine Islands where my father was born and raised. I wanted to reclaim the space of clinical data with fragments of my father's nomadic history, his Chinese origin, and how people have difficulty "placing him." By installing the work in this aesthetic context, the work also remains mindful of the transience of identity.

This image-text poem has been published in the Summer 2011 issue of Lantern Review.