Han Qin collaborated with the community of Long Island to portray the layers of diasporic identity shaped by the immigration experience. This outdoor, public art projection highlights immigrants using large-scale portraits, digitally projected onto monuments. Collaborated with musician Margaret Schedel who created the soundtrack based on the interview of community leaders.
Location 1
Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY
Dates
October 7- 8th, 2023
Time
7:00-8:00 pm
Location 2
Patchogue lighthouse
Screening |5:00-6:00 pm| November 11th, 2023
20 Terry St Suite 116, Patchogue, NY 11772
Opening Reception
MoCA Long Island
Opening Reception | 6:00-7:30 pm
20 Terry St Suite 116, Patchogue, NY 11772
My New Land-Cultural Fluidity
“My New Land” identifies and highlights unsung immigrant heroes in the community by allowing members of the community to vote for the individuals they would like to see honored in art. This project provides an alternative opportunity for community empowerment and partnership, especially for people who do not have the legal right to vote.
Invisibility and lack of voice are the primary challenges facing immigrant communities. Many communities and marginalized groups depend on a few leaders within the group to create a safe “time capsule” to maintain a shared culture and social connection. The project transforms the facade of local architecture into storyboards while appreciating unsung heroes who are building the community. My project’s purpose goes beyond honoring these unsung immigrant heroes. My New Land’s purpose is also to adapt and establish these community leaders’ new identities in their new land via the social-engaged art methodology. The projected portraits in My New Land are created with poetic colors and textures inspired by the unsung heroes’ unique identities. They evoke an ongoing history of immigration involving converging paths of unique ethnic identities. By creating a dialogue between this ongoing history of immigration with the local history of Long Island, my project becomes a socially-engaged community art project. As a socially-engaged community art project, My New Land intends to create a path of inner discovery, mental health, and confidence rebuilding for the broader immigrant and Long Island communities.
The music Margaret composed goes along with the timeline that both artists developed together, thinking of structure, movement and emotion. It is electro-acoustic-ambient saturated with starlight.
The piece consists of a resonated sample of the The Open Goldberg Variations is a project by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, and MuseScore.com, to create a public domain recording and score of JS Bach’s theme and variations. Margaret mixed in samples of water since many of the people interviewed mentioned having a connection to water. There are some samples of singing bowls and an organ sample. She also used recordings from the community leaders interview. Mason Youngblood studies the evolution of the songs of House Finches, a bird that immigrated to Long Island in the 1960’s from California so Margret added those in as well.
HOME
Home is an installation consisting of a cyanotype animation. It explores the feeling of relocating and immigrating as a personal journey, my own journey. It is a narrative moving image installation, inspired by the rich cultural landscape with a pair of fresh eyes seeing New York and the path of travel. The piece possesses a sentimental and delightful quality, which in turn implies a poetic depiction of the understanding of home.
ARTIST BIO | Han Qin
Pronouns | she, her, hers
www.han-qin.com
Han’s inspiration comes from her own life, and also draws from travelers and wanderers she encountered. Through migrants’ stories, and travel impressions, she seeks to visualize the movement and connection between who we are and where we go. While primarily focusing on digital art, Han’s work also extends to printmaking, video, installation and performance art. Han is a winner of the NYSCA artist award 2023 (New York State Council of Arts). Currently, She lives and works in New York as an artist and adjunct professor at Stony Brook University art department.
MUSICIAN BIO | Margaret Schedel
Pronouns | she, her, hers
http://schedel.net/
With an interdisciplinary career blending classical training in cello and composition, sound/audio data research, and innovative computational arts education, Stony Brook professor Margaret Anne Schedel transcends the boundaries of disparate fields to produce integrated work at the nexus of computation and the arts. She has a diverse creative output with works spanning interactive multimedia operas, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video game scores, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments with interactive audio and video processing.
(text & photo courtesy of the artist and the Heckscher Museum of Art)
