Facsimiled
Facsimiled distorts the original assignment—a straightforward seated figure study—into something more uneasy. The subject, a Cantonese woman, was styled in caricatured “Asian” garments, such as a bamboo hat, by a white artist. To interrogate this staging, I distorted my original study using a photocopier, then meticulously recreated the warped image with brush and ink. This process—duplicating a duplication—explores the limits of authenticity when the source itself is already a poor facsimile of an exoticized culture.