Interview: Stephanie Syjuco

Conversation from June 2020 on Syjuco’s recent exhibition at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Jim Ricks
You told me that your recent exhibition, Rogue States, at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis actually featured seven projects. I’ve seen some of those at different stages and when shown before, so it’s interesting to have them all come together in St. Louis in a different way, combined with new work as well.

Stephanie Syjuco
It was a real privilege in that I actually haven’t had a chance to do something like this before. It’s not necessarily a survey, but it was a tight curation of work made over the past five years. Usually the exhibitions I do are solo, in commercial galleries, or in museums where it’s just one project. When we decided to put in the Neutral Orchid series, there’s a way to make visible connections between some of the objects and images in the sculptural pieces and help the audience think through different methods of photographic color neutrality.

Neutral Orchid is a pretty monochromatic piece. It’s live orchids that have been spray painted with neutral gray primer and then photographed against a neutral gray backdrop. It’s flattening out or rendering monotone what would otherwise be seen as an exotic orchid. Which has implications: Orientalism, domestication, the exotic, foreign versus domestic.

Jim
For me the resounding message was the neutralizing of the exotic.

Stephanie
Yes, exactly. The funny thing about those orchids is that they were purchased from Trader Joe’s – which is an affordable chain grocery store – so these orchids have been cloned ad infinitum. There’s nothing special about them. They’re quite cheap.

I was also thinking about a living consumer item as a metaphor for owning a little bit of the other or the exotic. By spray painting them gray the attempt was to both deny that vision to the viewer, but also that when you paint something in a gray primer, what you’re preparing it for is its next color coat. You’re getting ready to paint it something else. So, I also wanted this notion of possibility. It has both wrapped up in this sort of the sadness of its demise, because essentially, I kill the orchid.

Jim
It’s interesting you talk about the mass production of the orchids. It makes me think of the piece that’s on the wall next to it, Cargo Cults, which is you, featured in four portraits, wearing various consumer goods that are also giving the consumer a little bit of the exotic. You’ve collected these objects and you’re cos-playing or in drag with them. The second part is there’s nothing in the images that say this is the artist. You’re playing with your own identity. By inserting your own identity, you’re saying is this a believable exotic image? It’s up to the viewer to determine that and up to them to move onto dissect and pick apart the image: to see a tag on something, or notice if it’s new or sideways. You’re really testing people.

Stephanie
Now that I think about it, it was a good choice of the curator to position both Neutral Orchids next to the Cargo Cults photographic series, which you’re referencing. The ones in which I’m standing in for this quote unquote exotic other was a really smart juxtaposition of those two projects because on one hand, Neutral Orchids is incredibly pale and drained; quite beautiful, but very ashen. And then Cargo Cults to me is very vibrant, graphically visible work. So they’re two sides of the same coin where they’re both dealing with challenging expectations of what the viewer wants to see in those images.

Jim
The other piece that’s right there is the images from the human zoo that was in St. Louis. That’s a new piece. I had commented before that it was like censoring, but that’s not the right word because the archive exists and that’s available to the public. You’re very consciously redacting some of the information, inserting yourself in between; protecting. It’s a challenging piece because you’re not giving the viewer the subject. You’re denying people that, I guess, satisfaction. Which is the point, right?

Stephanie
Yes, and with the work you’re talking about, Block out the Sun,I was hoping that the title would key into the viewer about the act of looking or photographic representation. Dodging and burning is a traditional photo technique in which someone in a dark room is either blocking out light or intensifying light on a certain part of an image in order to highlight or visually edit what the viewer should be looking at.

I’d spent two weeks researching different archives in St. Louis looking specifically at photographs taken of imported Filipinos that were brought to St. Louis in order to perform as a tribal representation of America’s new colony. The background on that is that the Philippines was a U.S. colony at the same time as Cuba and Puerto Rico. Blocking it was actually a very instinctual move.

I was looking at these photographs, physically sitting in an archive institution. I’m not allowed to touch the photographs as they’re considered ‘archival objects’. So how am I supposed to process these images and turn it into a new work? The other challenge was I wasn’t allowed to bring in accessories. The purpose of visiting an archive is to re-photograph the work or to find something that you couldn’t ordinarily see in reproductions, or to recover something that wasn’t deemed important enough to digitize and put online. So sifting through it is a very physical process. They are full of documents, photographs, notations, and all sorts of weird things. So, I also wanted to talk about the physicality of the archive. By rephotographing with my body literally implicated in the physicality of those photographs, it was a way to think about that. These are not just images that float freely around, they’re in repositories.

Jim
These three works are all photographic works. It seems to be very present in this exhibition. You’re playing with black and white and with color. You’ve denied the color in the Neutral Orchids and with Cargo Collective, where you’ve reduced the pallet as a way to examine the goods, and then you’ve combined black and white photography and color in Block out the Sun.

Stephanie
I’m glad you noticed that with the ethnographic photographs. The physicality of black and white photographs is always this reference towards early photography. Prior to color photography and the proper rendition of skin tones, black and white was the kind of, you know, the it was black, white and all shades of grey in the middle where it’s supposed to represent. You know, everybody knew. You know, all images, all skin tones, all forms of reality. And then with the advent of color, things got more complicated in the sense that a lot of the color film was calibrated towards white skin tones that skewed towards promoting the visibility of whiteness. And that’s an interesting metaphor, because it’s not just the physicality of the film, but it also became a conceptual conceit. Right. Of photography, like who takes the photographs? You know, it’s usually someone with capital and means or access. And then those being photographed as the subjects are the ones that then get turned into a form of capital, you know, being represented. And so I guess, you know, that’s a very circuitous way of saying that the newer photographic series in which I was intervening in archives. I also wanted to create this bridge through time. So, my body existing in the moment in 2019 when I did those and then those Filipino bodies represented in the photographs taken in 1904, I want to create this connection between things that had happened over 100 years ago and then the generational connection between the living and the dead. Or the living and the encapsulated because to be captured in photographs – it’s ironic when you think about those people being captured in photographs – because also, in a weird way, they were captured by the American imagination, and physically in the world’s fair.

Jim
Do you know anything about the people that were brought over?

Stephanie
Yeah. I mean, there were twelve hundred people that were brought over…

Jim
What?!

Stephanie
Isn’t that crazy? They represented five different types. When I did the Cargo Cult series, I’m also representing different types, there’s an effort to make tribal figures that look, quote unquote, different. Different from each other, representing different tribes, different groups of people, or different cultures. The same was true in the 1904 World’s Fair. The American public was curious about these types of Filipinos. They were also arranged by evolutionary progression, which is really awful. So, it’s obviously the more mestizo types – Filipinos that were intermarried or with Spanish or Chinese ancestry – those were the higher ups. Then you had all sorts of categories for the quote unquote, lower downs. But, yeah… twelve hundred. Some people were totally tricked into going. American emissaries had gone out to the Philippines, to different areas and got entire families, villagers who all knew each other to come as a group together. So there were whole family units.

Jim
What was their fate? Were they able to return home afterwards and back to a normal life?

Stephanie
Some did and some didn’t. It turns out that the Igorots, which were some of the biggest entertainment draws – these were the Filipinos that were encouraged to perform dog eating rituals – that they were then taken on tour afterwards. They had agreed also because they were making money, some money. I think there’s a big question as to who actually got enriched off of this, the Filipinos or their managers and handlers. But the Igorots then went on to other worlds fairs afterwards, in Portland, Oregon, and in Coney Island. So they traveled quite a bit. Some died also, which is awful, but the majority of them went home. There have been oral histories that were taken of their experience years later by their descendants.

Jim
Was there any criticism of this or was it just widely, just unquestioned as a normal thing to do at that time?

Stephanie
From what I see overall, it was quite normalized in the same way that American imperialism was, even though you had really strong detractors, like Mark Twain. Who was one of the literary and political figures actively speaking out against American imperialism. You did have some folks who were identifying that this type of practice of creating human zoos was demeaning or inhuman. I think that was a minority view because at that time racism, and the ability to abstract whole cultures for entertainment, was much more accepted.

Jim
And unchallenged.

Stephanie
Yes. The Human Zoo was framed as an educational tool where the whole point of the US. taking the Philippines was supposedly to educate and civilize them. What better way to make this case of continued American presence in the Philippines than to show how uncivilized the Filipinos were? And that what was really happening in the US colonization of the Philippines was a paternal lifting up of the little brown brother. Those are words that were actually used. So, it’s entertaining, just like zoos are entertaining, but you also look at animals in zoos to talk about how you need to save an endangered species.

Jim
You mentioned Mark Twain. Can you talk a little bit about the flag piece that’s outside?

Stephanie
Yeah. So when I was invited to do this project in St. Louis for the exhibition, every time I do a large show, I really try to involve or incorporate local histories or concerns, because I’m very conscious about trying to create projects that appear to be helicoptered in from other places where. St. Louis being smack dab in the middle of America and during the Civil War was also in the middle of the North and the South with some pretty entangled allegiances between both. St. Louis becomes this symbolic midpoint of America. But also I was very conscious of appearing to be this immigrant artist coming from California and dropping all these criticisms of America. So, I wanted to incorporate a local luminary of St. Louis into the work. Mark Twain wasn’t from St. Louis per se…

Jim
But he has a well known relationship to the Mississippi River.

Stephanie
Exactly, and he’s the accepted American critic, almost infallible in the way that he’s spoken of… Both his writings against Empire, as well as his novels. So I used him. I wanted to rest on his historical points towards American empire, specifically the Philippines. He wrote a very famous satirical essay called To the Person Sitting in Darkness. It’s a scathing critique of American empire in the Philippines, and references the American bringing light to the Filipinos who were sitting in darkness. To educate them. Again, there is this notion of light and dark, which both refer to ethnicity, but also to photographic processes, where the more light you have, the more you are able to expose the photographs and make something clear.

To the Person Sitting in Darkness in my show was a twelve foot flag that was hung in the courtyard of the Contemporary Art Museum. It’s based on a design that Mark Twain described in his essay of the same name. He literally just described a flag “that would better reflect American”. To address the atrocities of American imperialism in the Philippines, it would replace the stars with skulls, the white of the stripes with black. It’s a very straightforward description, but the flag was never made. So, I used that to create a contemporary commercially printed flag, and we hung it from a flagpole in the middle of the museum. It’s so interesting that it was literally designed over 100 years ago by a homegrown American. It feels very relevant today when we think about how the nationalism of the American flag has been weaponized.

Jim
I think it’s also really interesting because it’s inadvertently a proto-conceptual artwork. He writes instructions on how to make a flag that could actually have different interpretations or different manifestations…

Stephanie
That would then be actually made 114 years later, which is a really nice idea. Again, there is this linkage between times. Whether it’s interacting with 100 year old photographs or 100 year old essays and then bringing them forward to today.

Jim
I hadn’t thought of that before. So his instructions were over 100 years old and they were finally actualized in 2019 by you. You have a collection of other flags just adjacent, just inside from Mark Twain’s flag…

Stephanie
That’s called Rogue States and it’s from 2018. It first debuted in Russia. I was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. This project had been mulling around in the back of my head for a long time where I had been doing a lot of flag works recently. In 2018 in the U.S., specifically, there was a lot of concern about the fabrication of enemies. So whether that’s immigrants from Mexico or Syrian refugees, this whole notion of the United States being overrun by foreign others.

Jim
The empire always needs to position itself as good; as light; as the beacon liberating the world. It always has and it always has its cultivated enemies. It’s necessary to have the enemy other.

Stephanie
Yeah, and I’m one of those people that was, during the initial years of the Trump administration, an avid NPR news listener. Every day with this drumbeat of some form of unfathomable fabrication of an enemy, it was so overwhelming. So, I’m thinking about this fabrication, and how the narrative can shift so quickly so that all of a sudden, what was our neighbor is now our enemy. Thinking about how if we look at Hollywood as being representative of American desire or narrative or whatever stories the US wants to create to sell itself or export overseas. There’s a whole genre of films in which there is a foreign enemy that is a completely made up country. There’s multiple reasons for why a fake country would be made, maybe, you don’t want to necessarily slander other countries all the time. So it’s much safer to create a fake Middle Eastern-ish state or fake South American state. The more I looked into it – and there’s a lot – I ended up returning to this one web site that’s a crowdsource wiki for people who are obsessed with flags. That’s where I found all the other flags from different films. There was no category of enemy ones, so I had to go through every single listing with a fake country in it and then just try to make a decision as to whether that was considered an enemy or not.

From there, I re-drew all of them based on thumbnail shots from the films, and in some cases the wiki contributors’ own rendering. I then had them digitally printed as commercially produced outdoor flags. Rogue States in the end is 22 flags that are hung like a United Nations style display, so it appears almost like a gathering of enemies.

Jim
The space lends itself very well to that because it’s a higher ceiling with an open performance space below. And you get the sense that it’s a place for assembly.

Stephanie
When you look up and you see these lofted flags it inspires some form of togetherness, like: We’re all in it together; We’re coming together across the world. Then you read the text and you look at the hilarity of where these things come from and realize that the whole thing is a construct.

Jim
I feel like that’s part of the psychology of the Hollywood version of imperialism as well. There’s all these rogue states opposing ‘us’, the USA, but that’s totally fictional. In fact, there’s a lot of fragmented and drastically different reasons why peoples might oppose the United States.

Going back to your earlier point about ideology and Hollywood, fictional enemies serve as this depository for all the negative things you want to say about your enemies; all the negative stereotypes you want to lump in about a place. That’s a different and very probably fairly long conversation, but I do want to talk about the last pieces, the stages.

Stephanie
Taking up some of the larger, more open areas of the museum were two large platform installations. They’re positioned almost across from or adjacent to each other. They’re each 20 feet long. They appear like theater stages or a photographic studio stage. On top of them are hundreds of objects and images that are laid out in a loose narrative tableau. I consider them bookends to each other because one of them was made in 2016, during the early Trump campaign, and then the second, most recent one was made in 2019 in what I would consider a late stage of the presidency.

Jim
Which is which?

Stephanie
Neutral Calibration Studies: Ornament and Crime, was 2016. That’s the one with the Huey Newton rattan chair and images taken from Freud, New York MoMA… This was for me a pretty straightforward dissection of some of the ways in which Western culture has absorbed and ‘other-ed’ the rest of the world. Everything from art and artifacts to antiquities and modern art. These platforms exist as collage and a collected stream of conscience, in which I’m trying to focus on how the West constructs itself.

Jim
They’re really different, because they’re not ‘fixed’. The audience can associate this image with that object as they like. You’ve arranged them, but, there’s nothing overbearing or didactic about the way the information is received or connected. I agree, this is collaging because you’re allowing the viewer to connect disparate objects and create new ideas and meanings. It is also different in that you can walk around them and see the back. I can’t help but think of them as stages, although you’re using the word display. Also, they’re at 90 degree angles to each other… they’re purposely not ‘in conversation’ with each other, but they’re accenting each other.

Stephanie
I like what you said about their unfixed nature. Obviously, for the sake of creating an installation, one has to put together a singular arrangement, but because there’s one hundred objects that can be installed in different ways to tell different stories depending on how the arrangements are made, I really was thinking about the very fluid nature of narrative and how depending on the juxtaposition and layering of front, middle, and back, you can have all sorts of new meanings. What I’m trying to say with the stages – and I think that’s a really apt way to think about them – is that, that there is nothing neutral in the construction of who is running the show. Whether it’s American imperialism or whether it’s American history or whether it’s stories we decide to tell ourselves… they are all scripted with purpose.

This involves ‘actors’ behaving in certain ways; doing certain things, but there’s also the possibility that they could go off script. I was thinking about the literal layering in these stages, there’s things in front of other things or hidden behind things. It reminds me both of how one browses windows on your computer screen. You probably have right now ten windows open. Right?

Jim
Yes, something like that.

Stephanie
And they’re related in some way because you are using them, but they’re also collaged in a way where it’s very conscious why one thing is next to the other. I was thinking a lot about our own browsing proclivities when we’re searching for something, that we’re trying to make connections and find meaning through digital portals, and that this too is actually a kind of collage. So the installation references everything from physical stages, theaters, and narratives to the non-linear browsing structure of the Internet.

Jim
Which is incredible that you’ve been able to put that all together. I feel like there’s six or ten different pieces interwoven here that echo and reinforce other parts of the show and other parts of your practice. There’s so much information. It is an explosion that’s contained and organized. Like a very thought out set of Google searches that you’ve then presented and reworked. It’s really exciting how you presented the information and, I don’t know if this is even important, but it feels very new. I haven’t encountered this way of conveying masses of information to an audience.

You have this very ornate Victorian gown that is the green screen color, which is also an unfixed thing, because it’s you expect to see that in a certain historical pattern. But you’ve made it as a green screen, where you can add in whatever pattern you want. You also have the chequerboard pattern – the complete absence of information – from Photoshop in a dress as well. Those two I wanted to talk about specifically because, not only is there a ton of work in those, they’re complex pieces in their own right.

Stephanie
This is great because you know me and we worked together in the past, so it’s nice to hear that you’re able to find all the things that sometimes I’m unsure are actually registering with an audience. I consciously made those two platform works as cluster fucks of references. I also really wanted to fight against this notion that when, and in the US in particular, when an artist of color makes work that has anything to do with identity and perception of identity the audience wants to latch onto something that they understand. So when Asian artists make work, they look for the Asian-ness that’s in it. So by throwing together all these other things about how I view the construction of race and ethnicity and not purely from a quote unquote Asian perspective, I really wanted to challenge the expectations of the viewer. For example, it was exciting to be able to throw in Huey Newton’s rattan chair from the Black Panther movement, but also knowing that the rattan chair is a traditional Filipino handicraft. What’s that connection? And then also pulling in Man Ray’s famous 1917 photograph called Blanc et noir, French for black and white, and it shows this beautiful white woman holding an African mask. I wanted the viewer’s mind to wander, and I wanted it to start making connections that you can’t easily speak of in a linear manner. I wanted to show how deep rooted and pervasive both white supremacy and how this notion of looking and expecting something from a very linear story about race in America. Which is impossible.

Jim
To look at that in a linear way?

Stephanie
Exactly. You can connect so many dots about it. It’s everything. So, if we go back to the most recent platform project, Dodge and Burn, the one with the green screen, I also started to put in emojis.

Jim
There’s brown or black power emoji, the solidarity fist.

Stephanie
And there was a little shit. Which, at first when I started making them, I was afraid I was trivializing some of these issues, because there’s a lot of ‘ heavy’ images… like of Japanese incarceration during World War Two. If you were a historian, you can start to pick it apart, but I also knew that the audience wasn’t going to get all that, so I needed some other entry points.

Jim
You have a lot of images of fruit.

Stephanie
I was looking for tropical fruit that’s mostly from the Philippines and they all have those amazing watermarks on them. I regularly use stock photos with the watermark on them and what I love about that is that an image can become a commodity. So when I’m thinking about capitalism, everything is an ownership category and I think stock photography is the best example of that.

Jim
It also underscores your hyperlink or browser window approach, as do the emojis. I didn’t take that as making light, but as making it up to date, because I know not if somebody is going on their Livestream, you hit an emoji and there’s an effect of a bunch of the emojis floating upwards and I understood that as your audience being like “right on”, or hitting the fire one to say “cool exhibition Stephanie”. And you’ve embedded that in the exhibition, which is something that works in connecting historical photographs and references to a contemporary mode of communicating. You again span a vast timeline. That is also present when you place both photo and Photoshop references side by side.

Stephanie
If we think about early, early photography, where it was black and white photos and dodging and burning techniques, these very physical ways of editing and copying and highlighting things. And then we fast forward to today in which we’re awash in images, and we’re also awash in multiple ways of editing digitally and dropping out things. So when I think deletion, or cut and paste, or insertion, they’re also not just digital metaphors of image editing. They’re also metaphors for who gets to be in or out of the story.

The Photoshop transparency background, which is for those that are familiar with digital imaging techniques, it’s the very last layer in your image file in which if you remove everything this very graphic grey and white checkerboard pattern comes up. What I love about that checkerboard pattern is that, similarly to the Chromakey Green color, it’s a placeholder for a vast space and you’re not supposed to see it.

The Chromakey Green is something I’m carrying forward from another project in which I was hand sewing really intricate garments from American history using the green screen fabric backdrop as the actual literal fabric for the clothes. I’m not dying the fabric or anything like that. I’m literally cutting up and sewing the screens.

Jim
You’re using the official Chroma Key fabric that’s used for green screens.

Stephanie
Exactly. Yeah. So the backdrop is becoming the foreground. We should say and when I was doing that with these American garments. I was actually very specifically thinking about how white supremacy is an invisible backdrop to everything in America. I mean, to be incredibly blunt about it, you know, I mean, I think there’s also also a lot you can read into this notion of, you know, you can project anything on a green screen, like it can be anything you want it to be. It’s a very malleable and fluid backdrop. There’s potential and hope in it, also. So, one of them is thinking more about how white supremacy is just completely ingrained in American history and the present. The green screen for me was a way of showing how it’s just part of everything. And, it can be anything.

Jim
I read those two dresses as being about assimilation.

Stephanie
Yes. There are two dresses. One is in green screen and that’s what I call the American Belle Époque or industrialist’s dress. So that’s the 1904 fancy dress that a wealthy American woman would wear. And then the chequerboard dress, the dress that’s made from the kind of gray and white Photoshop, transparency, chequerboard fabric that is a traditional Filipino terno. Equally, it’s a dress that was very popular among the upper class Filipinos at that time. So they are sort of in opposition to each other. One is the background, the last layer on the digital file, which is the transparency background. And then the other one is the green screen backdrop that can do anything. It has limitless potential.

Jim
They have their backs to each other, perhaps in opposition. I find the piece difficult to pin down, and I keep going back to it and the way you installed it.

Stephanie
I’m really interested in extreme fabrication. By that I mean the literal hand making of something, because I also want to talk about how the literal construction of these things is also a mirror of the construction of the national narrative. The extremely fabricated garments from American history is a metaphor for the extreme fabrication of those narratives.

Jim
I like that. Is there anything else we should talk about?

Stephanie
Yes, there is one photograph that is set off on its own. It sits between the two platforms. It’s a photograph of an individual with sheer fabric draped over her. I made that in 2017 as part of a series dealing with belonging and citizenship in the US. It’s a portrait of an undocumented young person who was a student of mine at UC Berkeley, where I’m a professor. During the crisis that began during the 2016 election and up until today, the undocumented folks in the US, especially those that were granted temporary stays and were allowed to go to college and let on to think that they had a pathway toward citizenship… is in jeopardy now. I was trying to figure out how to adequately create a portrait of someone who was undergoing the kind of reality of potential removal, but also how to create a portrait that was humane enough so that they also weren’t being exposed. I really wanted to encapsulate this frozen moment of both disappearance or removal, but also protection. I tried to do that by covering her with a sheer piece of fabric that’s printed in the Photoshop transparency backdrop fabric. She’s rendered as a ghostly image, where you can only make out her outline. It is similar to the tactic I used in the Block Out the Sun work in which I was using my hands to shield these Filipinos that were put on display in the 1904 World’s Fair. The act of covering her was both protection and yet also a metaphor for her potential removal.

For me it’s been really difficult to think about these much larger political situations and how it’s really easy to to start abstracting it too much. With this particular portrait I really wanted to root it in real bodies and real people.

Jim
A contemporary ghost: a person was perhaps deported and their life was completely uprooted.

Stephanie
We’re still dealing with these notions of exclusion and disappearance and editing and construction of narratives today. If we were to look at where we are today in the US in terms of just being a total cluster fuck of wrong… Sometimes you hear people saying: oh my God, this just came out of the blue…. how did all this happen? My response is: wait a second, this is hundreds of years of ‘here we go again’; of the same thing. I want to make those linkages apparent.

Jim
One of the quotes on what happened with George Floyd in Minneapolis was Will Smith saying: “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed”. Which goes back to what you said about making the invisible visible, and using that metaphorically and literally. That’s a really important takeaway from the show.

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All photos by Dusty Kessler, courtesy of the artist and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.