UC San Diego

Out of Place serves as a record for the last three years of my practice, tracing the ideas that informed my work, braiding together the strands of conflicting ideas and research on the Salton Sea, plastic waste, dust, and how we are tethered to invisible labor and wastescapes. This paper is a patchwork, a quilt of my weavings with personal narratives, drawing upon Discard studies, Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, autotheory, and artists across disciplines to resituate my Asian American identity. This paper follows the trail of waste and debris, re-routed and re-formed, expressing the entanglement of our lives with non-human beings and the environment.