UnderGround, 1991

Commissioned for the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s 1991 Biennial, Sun’s UnderGround evokes a kind of stage set whose cast has long since departed. A spiral of field tools leads to vintage photographs of Chinese agricultural laborers and their white overseers, crated oranges are echoed in a photograph of a street vendor selling oranges at a busy intersection, and a series of maps show the origin points of Chinese immigrants while charting primary sites of anti-Chinese violence in late-nineteenth-century US With this tableau, Sun creates a transhistorical conversation with immigrants whose labor was long obscured in evocations of the West: the untold numbers of Chinese workers who broke and cultivated the previously untilled land and harvested its yield. In mining their legacy, Sun unearths some of the lesser-known roots of present-day California.