Hui-Min Tsen

Through interdisciplinary, research-based projects such as guided walks, installations, and printed books, I tell stories about ways in which the imagined landscape and the physical landscape co-occupy ordinary spaces.

Each project originates with a curiosity about an unseen element of a place (think: the idea behind the built forms, the room behind the closed door, the wind patterns over the land). I then repeatedly observe the place, walk it, research it, attempt to reach it. Through this process, I develop a narrative linking together pieces of history, the perception and experience of the place, and the ideas of power and identity that shape our understanding of the landscape.

Website:

www.huimintsen.com/

Residency Period:

Sep 2022–Oct 2022

Project Statement:

I will use the residency to develop a series of small, riso-printed books. The series is part of an ongoing project that brings the reader across a successive line of frontiers, starting with the Illinois prairie and heading westward across the American interior. Individually, the books tell specific stories of prairie remnants, Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home, the crossing of the 100th meridian, and how-to-find-the-frontier (among others). Taken all together, the books use moments of westward migration to explore the identities and paradoxes of the American narrative, forming a loose story about the ways in which imagined and tangible landscapes can co-occupy a single space.