Witnesses to Empire (1902-1913)

2025 | A.I.R. Gallery | USA

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

This series draws from the colonial photographs of Dean Conant Worcester, who first came to the Philippines as a zoologist studying wildlife and later returned as a central figure in the US colonial regime. His photographs helped reinforced narratives of Filipino “primitivism” and American “superiority,” and were ultimately used to justify America’s violent occupation. Here, I challenge the colonial gaze by omitting the human subjects and solely tracing and redrawing the surrounding plants. I imagine 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.