Yoon Cho
Nuclear Family Series
More info on Nuclear Family Series
Season’s Greetings ‘04, 2004, 11″ x 8.5″, inkjet print
Nuclear Family is a photographic series of my husband and myself posing as a young married couple in suburbia with an imaginary silhouetted baby. I lived most of my life in urban settings. In the second year of the marriage, we moved into our first house in a suburban neighborhood of young families where babies were spotted everywhere. Our family and friends asked when they were going to have little ones. In response, Nuclear Family series was conceived as a season’s greeting card with the picture of us posing for the camera as a happy family with an imaginary baby. As I was learning to live a suburban life, I captured the moments of us working around the house to create our new home.
These captured images of two individuals working together to build one new physical dwelling space transcend into building a new identity as one unit. The placed silhouetted baby reflects the conflict and conformity to my new environment in a suburban setting in the process of building my new identity as a suburbanite.
Car Washing, 2005, 20″ x 16″, digital c-print
Curtain Hanging, 2005, 36″ x 24″, digital c-print
Christmas Decorating, 2005, 36″ x 24″, digital c-print
Gazebo Assembly, 2005, 36″ x 24″, digital c-print
Hi Yoon,
Are you also exploring how notions of the nuclear “American” family is also racialized as European American? I’m thinking about the use of yellow for the silhouettes in the series.
Best,
Jillian
Hi Jillian,
Thank you for the question. The color choice for the yellow silhouetted baby is one of the most frequently asked questions for “Nuclear Family” series.
Actually, the color choice is not a reflection of race, but has to do with the gender of the baby. Yellow is a unisex and universal color for babies. My research on the baby items for the series started with a lot of shopping for baby showers. The color choices are blue for a boy, pink for a girl or yellow if you don’t know the gender of the baby. Although it is changing now, boys were preferred in Korean culture and I wanted to create a baby with no specific gender preference.
Also, with the exception of “Season’s Greeting Card ‘04″, we are not looking at the camera directly in the series. This allowed me to create some degree of ambiguity of our race in the series as I have friends with European, Hispanic and Jewish backgrounds with dark hair. I wanted the viewers to have an easier time relating to the pieces rather than looking at a specific race.
I think that the focus on gender is a really interesting approach. Upon looking at the images again I see how the faces of you and your husband are occluded. The manner in which you describe how this work has been generally interpreted as related to racial identity attests to how difficult it is sometimes to read race apart from gender/gender apart from race. Your response was really helpful for reminding me that these issues are always more complicated!
Jillian,
I think viewers tend to associate the color of yellow baby with race because of my Asian background. I am interested to see if this interpretation would remain the same if this project was created by someone with a different racial background.
Hi Yoon,
I think you’re right. I doubt that such a reading would have been applied, by myself and others, if your racial background was unknown. I am really glad you responded because this raises a lot of difficult issues that have made me more conscious about how I approach my readings of work by artists of color. There is an extent to which it is expected for artists of color to make critiques of racism, and they often do, but your comments also show how limiting this can be in terms of constraining the meanings of the work that extend beyond it. My initial comment about the yellow in “Nuclear Family” also stems from being a curator/scholar of color who analyzes visual culture through an anti-racist lens.
Your comments led me to think about how this reading practice also limits interpretations of work by European American artists conversely, as NOT dealing with “race” or “whiteness” as such. It’s interesting because it can unintentionally contribute to the notion that “whiteness” is unmarked.
Also, is there a danger in re-inscribing racialized tropes on artists of color by always looking for the anti-racist critique in their work?
If we move away from analyses of race would that mean that we would ignore the racial politics of work by artists of color?
These are some complicated questions that I hope more people can respond to on this forum.
All the best,
Jillian
Dear Jillian and Yoon,
I found an interesting reference to this topic in the New York Times book review on Sunday. In his contemplation of Colson Whitehead’s new book “Sag Harbor,” Toure writes about “post-blacks” reshaping “the iconography of blackness” in literature. He acknowledges the art world origin of the notion, and the rejection of racial labels by contemporary black artists (while not referring specifically to Thelma Golden, who should get the credit!).
In the project she just posted here, Saya Woolfalk also chooses to represent herself as a character in a world outside expected racial representations. You’re each creating a theatrical context and assuming identities.
Alison Ward shares your interest in stereotypes. She’s on this site, too.
Please take a look and tell us what you think.
Regards,
Cathy