PART I (Remix)

 

The completion of the first U.S. Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 is celebrated as a landmark event in mainstream America culture and academic discourse. Associated with the end of the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad is frequently depicted as an effort to heal the nation’s wounds and the division between the North and South (Lum et al., 2020, p. 27).

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However, much is omitted from this glorious historical narrative. Chinese migrant railroad workers, builders of the “Grand Pacific Railroad,” played a crucial role in breaking down the barrier between the East and West coasts of the United States. Their labor also established the world’s most significant “highway,” facilitating global trade, cultural exchange, and communication between China and America (Chang, 2019, p. 121). The Transcontinental Railroad functioned as a nineteenth-century “internet,” connecting people across vast distances and dramatically reducing travel time from the east to west coasts. As Maxine Hong Kingston wrote, “After the Civil War, China Men banded the nation North and South, East and West, with crisscrossing steel. They were the binding and building ancestors of this place” (Chang, 2019, p. 177).

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Rather than using the beautiful city maps that exclude those who contributed to building the cities in America, I used ceramic sherd patterns to tell the lost history and story of these Chinese railroad workers. In my work, “The East & the West,” the hand-drawn ghostly pixel patterns strongly echo the molded key fret banded decoration (CVAP IN-00408.001) on a storage vessel, which was recovered at Cangdong Village, the home village of Chinese railroad workers (Voss et al., 2019, p. 35). 

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The U.S. Transcontinental Railroad is handmade — constructed by relentless, repetitive labor under harsh conditions, much of it carried out by Chinese migrant workers whose perseverance and sacrifice shaped its path. My ghostly pixel patterns re-present this repetition, infinity, patience, and the passage of time, echoing the spirits of those whose hands laid the steel tracks that connected America.​

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The ghostly maze patterns, the symbol of disorientation, were remixed with existing Chinese poems, ballads, and songs, which tell the lost history and stories of immigrant workers. During the 1870s, the remains of thousands of Chinese migrant workers were transported across the Pacific back to China (Chang, 2019, p. 37). To represent the migrant workers’ remains that got transported between China and America, I used the Chinese immigrant workers’ “names” on C.P.R.R. payroll records.

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Additionally, the maze patterns on the left and right represent two worlds: the East and the West World, or China and America. The middle section represents the Pacific Ocean, where once “tens of thousands of letters traveled back and forth across the Pacific in the mid-to-late nineteenth century” (Chang, 2019, p. 9). However, no texts in Chinese or English written by Chinese railroad workers have ever been discovered, either in the United States, China, or anywhere else (Chang, 2019, p. 9).

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What happened to these many words written long ago? Arson, pillaging, and the willful destruction of Chinese belongings by hostile nineteenth-century mobs in America help explain the absence of an archive, as do losses during these immigrants’ many forced moves, ruin from earthquakes and fires such as at San Francisco in 1906, and the cruel devastation wrought by the many wars, civil upheavals, and revolutions in their land of ancestry. The habitual belittlement of their lives, and thus their archive, also deprived us of much of their record. Few, except perhaps their descendants and the exceptionally curious, wanted to know about the lives of Chinese laborers in America during the decades that have elapsed between their time and ours (Chang, 2019, p. 9).

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The Process of Artwork: 

I digitalized my six hand-drawn ghostly patterns, which are the past works I did in 2022 and 2023. Later, I uploaded them to the Miro Board, copied, pasted, and reworked them to create a new work, “The East & the West.” The materials include traditional Chinese ink, Strathmore sketch paper (9’’x12’’), think brushes, Winsor & Newton Ink, Pentel Brush Pen, and so on.

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Key Remix Concepts Related to Artwork 1: 

RW & RO Culture 

I started my remix research project by digging into a variety of archives, including academic journal articles and books related to the topic of transcontinental railroad and Chinese immigrant workers, the mappings on the official websites of the Library of Congress that contain historical documents, and CPRR payroll sheets (from 1864 to 1866) that record the economic history of the Chinese who helped build the Central Pacific railroad. All these sources and documents belong to the RO (Read/Only) Culture proposed by Lawrence Lessig (2008). In RO culture, audiences passively receive what is presented (Lessig, 2008, p. 85). There is no dynamic discussion around the materials students study with, so the structure is hierarchical (Lessig, 2008, p. 86). However, RW culture will not result in the loss of RO culture. Instead, RO culture is subsumed into the RW culture, and RO becomes the first step of remixing and learning from the past (Lessig, 2008, p. 106). I re-interpreted and reworked these historical sources for my final remix research project to find new meanings and untold migrant workers’ stories.

Educational Benefit

Remix is essential to RW culture (Lessig, 2008, p. 56). As Lawrence Lessig argues, “Doing something with the culture, remixing it, is one way to learn” (Lessig, 2008, p. 82). The ability to reject something and develop a new one via remaking and remixing is valuable. In RW culture, people can reinterpret and collaborate in the artistic creation, and education is essential in supporting the sharing and learning from the remixing process.

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Regarding the educational benefit of my remix research project, it aims to educate the public to avoid repeating tragic and cruel history, such as the massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs in 1885 (Hushka et al., 2017, p. 38). The assistant of Washington’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson told Zhi Lin that Trump’s 2017 Travel Ban targeted people from Muslim-majority countries, drawing a parallel to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Zhi Lin said, “Yesterday it was the Chinese, today it’s people south of the border or people with different faiths. We are doing it all over again” (Vansynghel, 2018).

Database & Narrative 

The relationship between the database and narrative logic has been flipped in the new media age. In the past, the narrative was given “material existence” (Manovich, 2002, p. 44), but now, it is the database that exists materially (Manovich, 2002, p. 44). The shift from narrative to database logic enables a more interactive and user-driven experience and promotes new artistic forms, such as computer art (Manovich, 2002, p. 46) and new aesthetics. Regarding my remix project, through using the interactive interface, Miro Board, I first listed out four categories of items, including blackout poetries, the existing songs/ballads/poetries from the academic journals and books, the Chinese immigrant workers’ names from the C.P.R.R. payroll records, and the abstract patterns I made previously. Later, based on the database, I remixed all these elements to form a series of artworks that tell different Chinese immigrant life stories. 

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In the new media, the database is a new “cultural form” that lists items without specific orders and provides the audience with different experiences of the world (Manovich, 2002, p. 38). Manovich argues, “This database is the center of the design process. It typically consists of a combination of original and stock material such as buttons, images, video and audio sequences, 3-D objects, behaviors, and so on. Throughout the design process, new elements are added to the database; existing elements are modified……” (Manovich, 2002, p. 44). Even though the database (paradigm) holds privilege over narrative (syntagm) in the interactive interface, the database is still organized along the narrative since the result is always a linear sequence of screens. It shows that databases and narratives can co-exist and support each other in contemporary media (Manovich, 2002, p. 43).​​​​​​​​​​​​​