Skowmon Hastanan

Tell Me a Story is a sculpture of glass crystal garlands made from chandelier crystals and beads. These garlands are suspended from Serendipity Café's entrance to capture and be illuminated by natural light. In the crystals, Skowmon Hastanan inserted hand-colored images and text from the Asian Arts Initiative's Chinatown Live(s) book, a collection of oral histories from Philadelphia's Chinatown. The crystals are strategically strung together to form garlands of immigration stories.

Interview

Please explain the process you used for creating your piece (materials used, major steps).

I'm using a variety of different crystals, mostly chandelier, but also some found crystals and beads. With these crystals, I'm inserting text and image excerpts from the oral histories found in [the Asian Arts Initiative's oral history book] Chinatown Live(s). I'm stringing these crystals together into a kind of garland story. These garlands will be suspended in the entrance to Serendipity Café, capturing natural light in the Café's incredible store front windows.

How did you come up with the concept for your piece?
a. How did the retreats help you develop your concept?
b. How did seeing Chinatown and talking to Chinatown residents affect your concept for the piece?

This piece was born from a piece I've been doing on my own. This is a glass sculpture I've been working on dealing with migration and immigrants, particularly women labor and trafficking of women. The sculpture tells stories of immigration.

The retreats helped me to become familiar with the neighborhood, the environment, people's hopes and expectations, to get the feel of the neighborhood and diversity of the Chinatown.

By using text and images from Chinatown Live(s), I used images from the Asian Arts Initiative archives. I transformed two-dimensional work that had already been done on Chinatown into a three dimensional piece to show life in Chinatown.

Why did you want to piece in Chinatown?

This project was given to us to do in Chinatown. There are many shared experiences among Asian immigrants - not just Chinese, but many people. In Chinatown, there is a concentrated space of commercial life and residential life - Chinatown has a special identity. I wanted to do a piece about this special place.

Did the process of creating your piece (retreats) change your perception of Chinatown?

It made me aware that there are more stories in peoples' lives that are usually taken for granted. I was made more aware of the journeys and the hard work of the people there. Now when I go to Chinatown in New York, I wonder where the people have come from, if they've traveled through 800 places before coming to New York.

Did you make any relationships with people in Chinatown or generally with the community?

I got a chance to generally meet people through the retreat.

How does this work fit with your wider body of work?

My work has always been about immigration, traveling, immigrant experiences. These experiences are about journeys - physical and spiritual. We're all always on a journey, we're always all going somewhere, we're always changing.