We Dance Over the Horizon

A surreal take on the Asian diaspora. Title is a playful photographic exploration of the sociology that surrounds immigrants of colour and their lives in the West.

We Dance Over the Horizon

To take up space is a privilege. Claiming autonomy in one’s own body and becoming a part of one’s living landscape is not a luxury all can participate in. Immigrants of colour in the West face unique prejudices and adversities within Eurocentric communities. Interestingly, however, the white majority also often exhibit signs of fear and anxiety over the growth of Asian population, economy and diaspora. It is this fear that drives the racist motivations behind phenomenons like the Asian Invasion, and Techno-Orientalism.

We Dance Over the Horizon is a sun soaked, glamorous response to such ideologies. It portrays Asian people frolicking in imaged utopias, taking up space inside places we are otherwise pushed away from. The playful movement of some of the figures inside the plates calls back to the spread of the Asian diaspora, and the staunch placement of others suggests a proud devotion to their new land. By becoming a part of the landscape, the body ceases to act as merely a form, but an integral pillar of what it means to be an immigrant, representing the very act of immigration, specifically in the West. Their presence in the work makes us wonder what it means to be Asian in the West, and most importantly, what it means to be a person of colour in a globalized society. Is it all a performance? That we cannot answer, but within this particular body of work, it is a literal Asian Invasion; a satirization of the taking over of space, with big surrealist forms mimicking the othering and alienating of Asian people. Furthermore, placing them inside landscape imagery of New Zealand, a country of stolen indigenous land, expands the vast issues of colonization and the social implications of harmful rigid Western philosophies.

This collection of images challenges the negative, somewhat melancholy connotations of immigration for communities of colour, and transforms what it means for marginalized peoples to live amongst each other in a place that we were not quite destined to call home, but must now find some meaning inside of.