Witnesses to Empire (1913-1924)

2025

In Witnesses to Empire, plants are present where human subjects were once photographed. The series references the colonial photographs of Dean Conant Worcester who arrived in the Philippines first as a zoologist to study its wildlife, and then returned as a key figure in the U.S. colonial administration. His photographs, which  reinforced narratives of Filipino “primitivism” and American “superiority,” were later used to justify America’s violent occupation. Here, I attempt to 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 of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan to experience Worcester’s photographs firsthand. My drawings in Witnesses to Empire are based on my own photographic documentation as well as based on the Research Center’s digital archive.