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HUNG LIU, RESIDENT ALIEN [[image]]

MANUEL OCAMPO, HERIDAS DE LA LENGUA [[image]]

I'm trying to find them together."
     Although settling in the United States has enabled Marlon Fuentes to think about his homeland and heritage with greater objectivity, he has never been completely at ease in America. Still thinking of himself as a Filipino after nearly two decades away from Asia, yet also very aware of becoming increasingly distanced from the culture of his birth the longer he is here, Fuentes uses his art to address a fragmented sense of identity perpetually suspended between East and West. In 'Untitled' from Face Fusion I series (Gelatin silver print), to address his ambivalence over the increasingly permanent nature of his presence in America, the artist merges his facial features with those of the Caucasian woman who was his wife at the time. By employing an overt physical metaphor, he incarnates both the tensions and the potential pleasures of mingling with different races and cultures in his adopted land.
     *Hung Liu, born in China, says, "I am inventing a way of allowing myself to practice as a Chinese artist outside of Chinese culture." In 'Resident Alien' (Oil on canvas), Hung Liu, who found the depersonalizing experience of registering as an alien reminiscent of life in Communist China, present an enlarged version of her 'green card', a form of identification required of all foreign residents in America. To mark her growing sense of kinship with Americans of Chinese descent, she wryly renames herself 'Cookie Fortune', after a dessert invented by Chinese Americans to suit Western palates. 
     *"You just can't change your skin and be American," says Manuel Ocampo, born in Philippines. In 'Pilipinas Anti-Kultura' (Acrylic on canvas with collage), opposed to the defence to almost anything Western that he perceives among many fellow Filipinos, the artist portrays a practically naked Filipino man with a globe in place of his head (signifying the many nations that have contributed to his homeland's culture) who eternally follows an image representing an ideal of European masculinity — a Grego-Roman Statue. 
     *"You draw the space around yourself and it becomes your house," says Zarina, who was born in Aligarh, India. Zarina, who visits the land of her birth regularly, was unsettled to discover that her decision to apply for citizenship after years in America raised inner fears, dormant since she first ventured outside India, of becoming estranged from her homeland. Realizing that migration was not only the central drama of her life, but a state of being that continued to define her sense of self after years in the West, she sought, through her art, to conjure of ways of balancing her presence in America with an enduring attachment to the culture of India. 
     In 'House on Wheels' (painted cast aluminum), Zarina's melding of two archetypal forms — the house and the wheel—signals that she has been able to banish the dread of rootlessness by accepting that her Indian heritage is something she will always carry with her wherever she dwells. 

30 LITTLE INDIA MARCH 1994