Indigo Som, “Golden China, Red Wing, Minnesota,” 34” x 34” iris printm 2003

Indigo Som and the Chinese Historical Society will collaborate to create and exhibit “Sweet & Sour Catfish: Chinese Restaurant Project South”, new work about Chinese restaurants in the American South. The collaboration will include interviews, archival and historical research, and a weblog chronicling Som’s travels as she photographs and records sound in Chinese restaurants throughout the South. The resulting artwork will be exhibited at the Chinese Historical Society of America, with an accompanying exhibition catalog

Sweet & Sour Catfish is an important installment of Indigo Som’s broader Chinese Restaurant Project—a long-term, multifaceted investigation of the relationships between Chinese restaurants and American culture and identity. The project hopes to stimulate critical recognition of the Chinese restaurant as an archetypal icon of American experience by posing questions about the place of Chinese restaurants in the foodscape and imagination of America. Som notes that Chinese restaurants are the most pervasively visible manifestation of Chinese American presence in the United States. For many Americans of non-Chinese descent, the restaurants provide the main point of contact with Chinese culture and people.

Som is particularly fascinated by the consistent presence of Chinese restaurants in places otherwise notable for the apparent absence of anything—or anybody—else Chinese; these isolated restaurants have an emotional as well as conceptual resonance for the artist, who relates them to her experience of growing up Chinese American in a predominately white community. “Sweet and Sour Catfish” focuses on Mississippi and Alabama, which are 0.1% Chinese American. The project roadtrip will also encompass small parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, which also have very low Chinese American populations. On previous roadtrips, Som has photographed Chinese restaurants in Wyoming (2002) and in Minnesota and Wisconsin (2003). She exhibited her Chinese restaurant photographs from these trips in October 2003 at Mills College Art Museum in Oakland.

Using the idiosyncratic $20 plastic Holga camera, Som photographs the restaurants in a simple, direct manner and enlarges them as 34” square Iris prints so that they physically command attention as windows onto their landscapes. In the course of her earlier research, Som became inspired by the restaurants’ evocative sounds—from the clatter and sizzle of woks and silverware to the infinite variations of Chinese-accented English spoken by immigrant restaurant workers, and the equally interesting voices of local-born workers and customers alike. Som will gather sound during her travels in the South and create new work incorporating her recordings, experimenting in this medium for the first time.

This project draws together several recurring themes from Som’s past work. Perhaps the most consistent thread throughout her work has been her quest to make the mundane visible, to call attention to the unquestioned details of daily life, especially through the concept of many small, repetitive actions or events accumulating into a significant presence or transformation—as in her installations with common office paper or salt. Som’s interrogation of American identity, especially in terms of gender and ethnicity, is exemplified by her work deconstructing “wholesome, all-American” blue and white gingham fabric. Most recently she has explored language, education and American pop culture in her grammatical diagrams of pop lyrics. A constant and sensitive attention to place, landscape and architecture has also emerged as a throughline in Som’s installations. In her current work with Chinese restaurants, all of these ongoing themes resonate and interact with each other in new ways.

Founded in 1963, the Chinese Historical Society of America is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and presentation of the history of the Chinese in the United States. The Society has hosted exhibitions, lectures, workshops, field trips, and special events that promote the legacy of Chinese in America.

In this collaboration, the Society will make use of its network of contacts within Chinese American communities to facilitate the artist’s work in the South, and its staff historians will guide project research, and provide helpful material from its archival collections. The geographic focus of the project will offer the Society the opportunity to look at a part of Chinese America that it has not focused on in previous exhibits.

Indigo Som is a visual artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Widely exhibited in group and solo shows at venues such as Mills College Art Museum, Islip Art Museum, and the New York Public Library, Som’s artwork has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and The Getty Center, among other institutions and collectors internationally and throughout the U.S. She has been awarded residency grants from the Anderson Center, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Centrum. Her work has received critical attention in such publications as The New York Times, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, and Art Papers. Her own writing has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Bamboo Ridge, stretcher.org, Asian Pacific American Journal, and Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry. More information is available on her website at www.indigosom.com

Indigo Som, untitled, site-specific installation, Prince Street living room (wood paneled room with hardwood floors, peeled latex housepaint, used facial tissue, 2000