Chinen Aimi (2019): Finding Ryukyu, circa 2019-2020

Extent:

.25 Linear Feet

Scope and content:

Chinen's winning proposal, "Finding Ryukyu," combines text and drawings with 35mm black-and-white photographs to investigate her various histories as a child born on the island of Okinawa, Japan (part of the island chain that was the Ryukyu Kingdom), to "an indigenous Ryukyu (琉球) mother and a U.S. Marine father," as she writes, "the colonized and the colonizer."

The letter included with the smaller prints is addressed from Aimi to Alexa Dilworth of the Center for Documentary Studies and speaks to Aimi's vision for the project.

From the artist's awards statement: "...I began to look at the relationship of images to hierarchies of words, languages, and translations to see how that dominates or silences histories depending on the presenters and/or viewers of the image. I first made photographs of island plant life, memorials, and landscapes on black-and-white film. Then I created schematic drawings on glass that I placed over the paper during exposure in the darkroom. Visual signs such as dots, arrows, and transliterations become encoded in the image, mapping and connecting names, dates, notes, and events. Through this process, which revealed how words and images create contradictions and ambiguities, I began developing an archive of my ancestors' silenced history that explored where and how their traditions had been severed, polluted, and paved over."

Biographical / historical:

Chinen Aimi (1988- ) is a Japanese-American artist born in Okinawa. She graduated with an MFA in Intermedia and Digital Art from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2019. She has been the Curator-in-Residence at Baltimore's Feminist Art Project and coordinated artists and curators at the Center for Art Design and Visual Culture in Baltimore; she also works at the Potters Guild of Baltimore and Corradetti Glass Studio. Aimi was awarded the 2019 Center for Documentary Studies Lange-Taylor Prize for the project, "Finding Ryukyu."

[Adapted from the CDS Lange-Taylor Prize website, viewed December 1, 2023]

Physical facet:

8 photographic prints; one letter

Dimensions:

8x10 inches (2), 16 x 19 3/4 inches (6)

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