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Missing Identity

At home, Lucas Nguyen (First Year Foundation) ate a lot of fish heads.

Just the mention of the meal would elicit strong reactions from classmates while growing up in Kansas. Even bringing out onigiri—simple rice balls—at the lunch table highlighted a perceived “weirdness.”

"Sometimes I’d be bullied or shamed for my cultural foods. And sometimes I feel like Asian Americans today lose that portion of their identity because of that shame or harsher experience they may have gone through,’ Nguyen says.

The connection between food and culture is a central inspiration behind Nguyen’s two pieces in Dissonance. One of them, a fiber sculpture, takes the form of a giant crocheted milk carton. Nguyen created the patterns, including the words “Missing Identity” and “Missing Culture” alongside the crocheted images of certain Asian foods.

Nguyen, a child of immigrants, describes their cultural background as Chinese-Vietnamese. While growing up, their grandmother spoke Cantonese, but Nguyen never fully learned the language—just as they didn’t pick up Vietnamese, which their parents could speak but not write.

Image: Lucas Nguyen, Missing Identity & Culture

Created Distance

Kansas City is 7,700 miles from New Delhi, a distance Yash Pratap Singh (Junior, Filmmaking) often thinks about. Born in Arkansas and having spent most of his life in India, he feels the separation in different ways.

For example, Singh is bilingual, having multiple accents as well. His mother tongue is Hindi—but when he’s in Missouri he speaks in an Americanized version of English. When back in India, he switches to his original dialect while speaking English or Hindi.

“It’s something I’m still navigating—why do I feel the need to change my accent depending on where I am? My father has been a big influence on me watching films. He always had Turner Classic Movies on, so I grew up with Western films, rather than just Bollywood. That’s shaped my perspective a lot,” Singh says.

Singh’s father (“A bit of a storyteller. Or he likes to think so.”) plays a large part in his contribution to Dissonance. 350-100-450 is an 8-minute, 24-second film in which the filmmaker deliberately created distance between all parties: Singh didn’t reveal much about the film to his father (reached in New Delhi by phone) or his collaborator, Noah Anthony (‘22 Graphic Design), until late in the process.

"I asked my father to tell me a story—anything he felt like—and I would then make a film to accompany that audio. I was very excited by how our distances and limitations in connection would undeniably create a contrast in the film, but I was also adamant that there would still be a tether in our ways of storytelling,” Singh says.

From a Place of Joy

The Tamagotchi is too big for any keychain. Milled out of Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) and spray painted reddish-pink before adding a plexiglass screen—Sarah Manuel (Senior, Printmaking) says the upscale comes from deeper thought on the concept.

“You are, like, the parent of this little creature that you raise. And you have to take care of it or else it will die,” Manuel says. “Kind of morbid.”

In her piece, Manuel describes the two characters as “the inner kids of the past” now all grown up. By having them say “THANK YOU FOR BEING OUR FRIEND,” Manuel relates it to saying “Thank you for raising us.”

“By making it large, I was thinking about how these feelings and imagery are almost too big to just carry around now—conscious or in the little pocket of my mind. I wanted to give it actual space,” she says.

Manuel, Co-President of the 91���� AAPI, incorporates a lot of text in her artwork—thinking in terms of what her characters would say. Those characters are often representations of an internal self, like an inner child or even an alternate version of herself. Much of her work taps into thoughts about her personal experience as an Asian American adoptee, born in China.

Avoided in her work, however, is angst.

“There is a lot of art out there that has to do with this reflecting or pondering of life in the motherland,” she says. “I kind of implement that in my work, but I also try to come at it from a place of joy or appreciation of my roots and or home. And then I’m trying to explore and have more positive feelings with it.”

In Manuel’s exploration, the result in Manuel’s art is an expression of her subconscious. “Vibes,” she says. “That’s how I work on the images. I kind of let them freeform come out.”

Image: Sarah Manuel, Tamagotchi Twins