Staff Pick, 2024
Entering souvenir shops along Canal Street in Chinatown, I realized that the people selling symbols of “America” are often immigrants themselves—those who do not come from here, selling national fantasies to visitors who do not belong to the city either. I asked each staff member to pose with an object from the shop they personally favored. The portraits were later transformed into keychains and displayed on a Christmas-tree rack, mimicking the store’s own logic of presentation. The work reflects on how identity, labor, and national symbols circulate as commodities within a globalized economy.