Witnesses to Empire (1890-1902)

2025 | A.I.R. Gallery | USA

In Witnesses to Empire, plants are present where human subjects were once photographed.

This series critically engages with the colonial photographs of Dean Conant Worcester, who first came to the Philippines as a zoologist and later became a central figure in the US colonial regime. His images were far from neutral, constructing narratives of Filipino “primitivism” and American “superiority” to justify violent occupation and frame imperialism as a moral and civilizing mission. My work explicitly rejects this pro-imperialist framework: by omitting the human subjects from his photographs and tracing only the surrounding plants, I disrupt the colonial gaze and its visual logic. In shades of indigo ink on handmade paper, I reimagine these plants as silent witnesses to American imperialism in the Philippines.

In 2022, I visited the Reading Room at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to see Worcester’s photographs firsthand. The drawings in Witnesses to Empire developed from that visit, based on both my own photographs and images from the Research Center’s digital archive.