MOCATALKS: Archivist of Chinese Americana

Presented by the Museum of Chinese in America. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Over the years, critic (and packrat) Hua Hsu has been thinking about the relationship between material culture and immigrant identity. For this talk and slideshow, he will curate a selection of things that comprise the immigrant household—souvenirs, photographs, newspaper clippings, old vinyl LPs, figurines, old suitcases—and try to make sense of what his collecting efforts mean at the intersection of memory and identity.

Hua Hsu is an associate professor in the English Department at Vassar College. His criticism has appeared in Artforum, The Atlantic and Grantland, and he is completing his first book, A Floating Chinaman. He is currently a Ford Academic Fellow at the New America Foundation and a board member at the Asian American Writers Workshop.

This program is held in conjunction with the exhibition Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving.

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