c/o Yijing Lai
“Exploding and Netting: A Somatic Archive of Transpacific Movement,” a student-curated exhibition, opened in the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies on Thursday, Feb. 29 and will remain open until Saturday, May 25, 2024. The exhibition features the work of Loren Yuehan Wang ’25 and was curated by Yijing Lai ’24 and Xiran Tan ’24.
When entering the exhibition, visitors discover a sedimentary deposit of 15 buckets of dirt that have been gathered from the shores of the Connecticut River. Above the sediments is a video projection of places Wang filmed during their travels around California, New Mexico, New York, and Utah. Bringing the sediments to campus took four days of back-and-forth trips.
“Exploding and Netting” uses the idea of sedimentation to open a discussion into the deeper history behind the creation of our institution. Wang, Lai, and Tan spent countless afternoons sifting through the College of East Asian Studies (CEAS) archives for materials related to the history of the University’s property and finances. Uncovering this information, the team aimed to highlight the perspective of Chinese international students that had often been overlooked in archival work.
One of the silenced stories of the University involves Russell House, which is connected to Russell & Co., a company that traded tea, silk, and opium in Canton, China, during the 1800s. By the mid-1830s, Russell & Co. had reached a near monopoly in the American opium trade. In 1839, Russell & Co. attempted to trade 1540 chests of opium with the Qing Dynasty government. However, this opium was mixed with limestone and salt, and it broke down at the touch of water, leading to a dispute. Amid heightened trade tensions, the opium was sent overboard and flushed away forever in the Pacific Ocean.
The “Exploding and Netting” exhibition introduces more visual elements to ideas explored in a previous CEAS gallery exhibition, “Understanding China in the Age of Unequal Treaties,” curated by Sabrina Tian ’24. Tian’s gallery outlined the treaties that led up to the Opium Wars, while “Exploding and Netting” complements this political history with archival research and artistic exploration.
Tan, a CEAS and English double major, shared that their experience working on the exhibition has been inspirational.
“The exhibition inspires me to think about history and relationships through the lens of sedimentation,” Tan wrote in an email to The Argus. “Loren explored how the CEAS building was made out of brownstone, a kind of sedimentary sandstone that is formed in the process of minerals weathering and being compressed together. They chose to quite literally [dig] up dirt fused with brownstone fragments from the bank of the Connecticut River and install it in the exhibition.”
As the student artists explained, from 1690 onwards, the Wangunk people of present-day Middletown were dispossessed from their homes. European settlers dug up the grounds of Wangunk people’s homelands in order to build housing across the Quinetucket (Connecticut River) toward New York City and Washington, D.C. Part of the dug-up sedimentary sandstone is present at the Mansfield Freeman Center, where the CEAS department is housed.
“I think it also metaphorically shows how history is layered with different materials and always more than it seems,” Tan added. “I am inspired to research and reflect further on how the University bears its colonial and imperial history, and yet also can offer a generative space for genuine, caring connections to form and resist against this part of the history. Just as how different minerals, sediment, both can exist at the same time. We are responsible for both.”
The students worked on the gallery exhibition as part of a 0.5-credit tutorial in the fall semester. The curation tutorial will be offered again in Fall 2024. Advised by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee, Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox, and a CEAS faculty member, the tutorial is a unique opportunity to work directly with the CEAS faculty and Center for the Arts professionals, and culminates in the students’ own CEAS gallery exhibition. Interested students should reach out to Chair of CEAS Takeshi Watanabe at twatanabe@wesleyan.edu.
Baron Fisher can be reached at bfisher@wesleyan.edu.