Mar 23rd, 2024.
Video and Ink & Paper.

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Art by Ramin Takloo-Bighash
Prose by Yiwen Lyu

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When I decided to leave New York, the decision was made fast. Leaving seems easy when you have no history attached to a place. Except for the four years living there. When I reformed who I am and made friends that I intend to keep a little longer. In the next year or so, when I refer to “where I used to live”, it will be the janky house in Red Hook New York.

During one Thanksgiving break when I was still in Red Hook, I went with my roommate to visit her family. I was struck by my own hesitation when someone asked me “Where do you live?”. I understand they were trying to ask me where I’m from. The wording of this question points out a quality of home that is intuitional and yet doesn’t apply to me. Not only I haven’t physically been back in Shanghai or seen any of my family in two years, but I have lost the sense of belonging to that city. That is in comparison to how I was secure and felt belonged in Red Hook. In retrospect, the pandemic was the accelerator of this sense of displacement and disconnection, which is probably universal to some extent.

I go into cycles of secretly binge-watching Chinese TV shows once every few months. It is a way to approximate how I lived in Shanghai, even though I became cynical about everything I believed and cared about when I was there.

It is rare to categorize life geographically rather than chronologically. It leads me to a rhizome structured worldview that doesn’t confine to the linear quality of time. To be surrounded by entirely different environments, other people’s expectations influenced my presentation of self, and my projection of others adjusted to reciprocate what I have perceived.

In other words, I feel like a different person when I’m in different cities.

I knew that by not having a strong accent when speaking English, dressing like a typical liberal arts college student, and having close friends who are all American, I would be perceived as an Asian American. I go out of my way and emphasize that I am not, whenever someone asks. But at the same time, I can’t explain why I go by Catherine and not Yiwen most of the time. I started to text my high school friends more often, and I got hurt when they jokingly called me a “white woman”. My attempts to explain the racial dynamics that I have experienced and learned throughout the years only reinforced their opinion that I’m way too Americanized and therefore “white”. The fact that I immediately recognized and got slightly offended by this white-centric joke proves that I have been marinating in American society. Labels for identities turn out to be less diverse.

My anxiety of finding who I truly am is strong. Sincerity is the most cliché thing I have chased after. Then, my fear of being one of the multiples, of the ordinary, or even predictable stops me from admitting my anxiety. It creates a push-and-pull dynamic within me. On some days, I want to reflect upon the experience of living in two countries and develop some sort of analytical language to describe it so I can understand myself and the intersectionality of every social category I can be put in.

What does it mean to be a woman? A Chinese woman? A Chinese woman living in America where she is perceived as an Asian American woman? A Chinese woman lived in America and went back to China then being seen as too foreign? Where do I go back to?

Then on other days, I just want to leave and move forward. One thing I am sure of is my foreignness, and keeping myself foreign is a good strategy to maintain this certainty.

Did I miss home? Yes. Did I think leaving was the end? I just keep going. How can I miss a place I never believed I would stay?

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吕怡雯 Lyu Yiwen | Catherine Lyu received her BA degree in Studio Arts from Bard College. Her art practice is concept-driven where she reflects and reacts upon herself. The discussion extends into the intersectionality of identity, interpersonal relationships, primitive emotions, and intuitive moments. Recently, she’s been interested in moments derived from compulsiveness where connection and comfort were sought through absurdity and humor.

Ramin Takloo-Bihash | I was born in southern Iran in 1974 close to the border of Iraq. I immigrated to the US in 1995 to enroll in a graduate program in mathematics. I received a PhD in math in 2001, and I have been working as a math professor ever since. I learned Persian calligraphy as a teenager in southern Iran, first from my father and then a Mr. Reza Beyt-Anab. For years I had done calligraphy but I had not thought of it as an art form with relevance to contemporary art. Based on conversations with the Chicago-base Egyptian artist Hamdi Attia I started exploring calligraphy as it related to cartography in 2017. Currently Persian calligraphy forms the core of my artistic practice. In addition to calligraphy, my practice also involves writing, photography, film, and sculpture. I received an MFA in art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2023.

I search for that elusive it that gets eliminated from one’s life when a person has been subjected to trauma over long stretches of time. I grew up in southern Iran and moved to the US immediately following my 21st birthday in 1995, so these notions are very personal to me. Something happens to you when you see someone be torn to pieces in an air raid. When you grow up queer, but you occasionally hear that a queer person has been hanged for no crime other than being queer. When you are ten years old, and you wake up one morning to the news that the cousin you were close to has died in a chemical warfare attack. When you are thirteen years old, and you get punched in the face fighting over bread after waiting in line for three hours in 130-degree heat. But until not too long ago I wasn’t even aware that I needed to talk about these concepts. In the passing moments when I did consider talking about my traumatic experiences, I quickly talked myself out of doing so. I told myself that the emotions accompanying my thoughts were melancholic stupidity that didn’t deserve recognition. And that experience felt like threading a needle in darkness, a darkness that was swallowing my voice, something akin to screaming under water. A continuum of darkness had filled the outside, the inside, and the space that separated the two. But the space that separated the outside and the inside is where it had lived. Where it and I had lived. Where we had stayed for years, waiting to find a way to come inside, to leave the margins of reality and materialize, to acquire shape. And the shape we acquired was that of scribblings on large sheets of papers. Of steel rods somewhat resembling words. Words to replace what it is like to scream. Words to emulate keeping quiet. Words to represent pain. Words resembling the things we brought. The things we left behind. The shape of words that were written, of animals that were harmed, the words that were not meant to be read, the animals who were rescued, of cups and ashtrays that sit gathering dust, of walkways, of parks, of playgrounds where terrifying things had happened, of pottery wheels, and little plants that grow out of clay pots just before they are put in the kiln, of people cooking, of my mother at home, of old music, of huddling together and gossiping, of watching my mother age, of my youngest sister being the oldest person in the world, of surviving. Art is not a luxury when you search for that of which you’ve been robbed.

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1000 Words | Home Not Home Artists + Writers

Noa Alemán + Tamar Brooks • Jacqueline Almaguer + Alanis Castillo Caref • Lexi Alvarado + Isabela Ortega • Danielle Arend + Janina Gatilao • Sofia Brunwin + Spencer Hutchinson • Andrea Cole + Rocio Franco • Lydia Collins + Tarnynon Onumonu • Gregory Diaz + Irvin Ibarra • Danielle Dykerhouse + Betsy Van Die • Jonathan Espinoza + ben-aki • Jaymes Fedor + Maria Requena • Samantha Franco + Angeles Rangel • Ines Gardea + Angelica Davila • Frank Geiser + Penny Mann • Evelyn Hernandez + Valeria Osornio • Stephanie Hererra + Neha Chawla • Ivana Jarmon + Theo Sullivan • Vivian Jones + Luz Silva • Lewis Lain + Thulasi Seshan • Cesar Luna + benedicta m badia • Marie Magnetic + Jasmine Rodriguez • Delisha Mckinney + Paloma Velasco • Diana Noh + Juj-Lepe • Andrew Rehs + Corbett Berger • Clau Rocha + Maria Jose Ramos Villagra • Amyia Ross Brittanii Batts (Tanae b) • Fawaz Sakaw + Arianna Maggio • Lucero Sanchez + Clay-Cofre • Ramin Takloo-Bighash + Yiwen-Lyu • TEEL ONE + Melody Contreras • Pamela Trejo + Kim Yeoh • Cindy Uriostegui + Scum Drop • Ami Vasilopoulos + Stephanie Cruz Rincon • Ivy Waegel + Aryn Hills • Emily Schroeder Willis + Angelica Flores • Raine Yung + Micaela Petkus