A Painting for the Emperor | Johann Jacobs Museum | 2018

from faraway lands to dust we return is Chung’s response to Joseph Dwight Strong’s painting, Japanese Laborers on the Sugar Plantation, commissioned by the King of Hawai’i in 1885. The painting was intended as a gift to the Emperor of Japan for sending approximately 29,000 Japanese to work at sugar plantations in Hawai’i at the peak of Japanese migration to the islands (1885-1894). Chung’s work brings in focus the multicultural laborers who performed the back-breaking work at Hawai’i sugar plantations, some of whom were later buried at the forgotten Ewa Plantation Community Cemetery in O’ahu. The work draws the cemetery plots of these deceased workers, written with their names and bango–a dehumanized number each of them was assigned when landing in Honolulu. Chung rendered the marked plots partially illegible, with overlapped colored dots and patterns to depict overgrown vegetations covering the gravestones, conceptually referencing the land as a traumatic site of memory: transpacific migration, plantation labor, economic expansion, and military imperialism.

Known for her intricate and complex work that interweaves social, political, economic, and environmental issues, Chung’s drawing alludes to the layered and complicated history between U.S. and Hawai’i in the late 19th century, and between the U.S. and Japan at WWII. Foregrounds a classic case of economic interests shaping foreign policies including military ambitions, Chung revisits the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, a free trade agreement that guaranteed a tariff-free market of the U.S. for Hawaiian sugar in return for the U.S.’ special economic privileges, which ratified in 1887 to include exclusive rights to establish a U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor in O’ahu.