Tracing What Remains: Memory, Place, and Chinese American Histories

Presented in conjunction with Patty Chang's surfacing, Tracing What Remains: Memory, Place, and Chinese American Histories brings together films that examine the histories of Chinese communities across Northern California through landscape, memory, and acts of remembrance. Moving between documentary, historical narrative, and poetic reflection, these films trace the enduring presence of communities whose lives and labor were systematically erased from the historical record.

From the displaced Chinese fishing villages of the San Francisco Bay to the expulsion of Chinese residents from Eureka, these works reveal how places can hold memory even when official histories do not. Together, they ask how artists can recover forgotten stories, map absences, and imagine new ways of bearing witness to the past.

Following the screening, filmmakers, Chisa Hughes (Many Moons) and Rene Yung (Chinese Whispers) will join in conversation with surfacing co-curator, Kelsey Chen to discuss filmmaking as a practice of historical recovery, the relationship between place and memory, and the ongoing work of preserving Chinese American histories.

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Films

Many Moons 

2023 | 21:43 minutes

In the county which once boasted it was “free of Chinamen,” Chinese community members search for those who may have survived Humboldt's 1885 expulsion and 60 years of enforced exclusion– the only known survivor being Charlie Moon, whose descendants are Native tribal members. Framed by the words of a ghost, this hybrid documentary/fiction film alternates between the observational search for ‘the others’ with the appearance of ghosts as the past demands recognition in the present.

Chinese Whispers: Bay Chronicles - Sailing Expedition 

2014 | 9:00 minutes

Chinese Whispers: Bay Chronicles is a project by Rene Yung in collaboration with San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. This 2014 sailing expedition retraces the forgotten history of Chinese shrimp fishing around San Francisco Bay, once home to a thriving Chinese shrimp fishery. The Bay Chronicles team set sail on the NPS’s replica Bay junk Grace Quan in a series of voyages around SF Bay to locate major former Chinese shrimping sites. Public programs took place in Richmond, Hunters, and China Camp.

Panelists

Kelsey Chen is an interdisciplinary theorist, artist, and PhD Candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Her scholarly work has been generously supported by the ACLS, the Stanford Arts Institute, the Mellon Foundation, the Stanford Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Stanford Center for Spatial & Textual Analysis, and the Pigott Fellowship. Her artistic work has been supported by the Anicka Yi Studios Metaspore fellowship and exhibited at et al gallery and 120710 gallery. While at Stanford, Kelsey was graduate co-chair of the Stanford Humanities Center Asian Diasporic Art & Aesthetics Workshop and has founded and led a handful of graduate-led initiatives, including the Ancient Futures symposium and the Materials & Culture Research-Creation Workshop. She is currently artist-in-residence at Now Place, an independent bookstore and press in San Francisco Chinatown.

Chisato (Chisa) Hughes uses film to explore new forms of relating and worldbuilding. They are currently working on a film about a sentient mountain to talk about war and exile + and a guerilla film about trans hackers undermining technofascism in the Bay Area. Their first film “Many Moons” looks at the webs of relation between Chinese people and Native people that formed out of the violence of white settlement in Humboldt County, California. Chisa is a founding member of timetides cooperative, a transnational Bay Area-based collective of trans, nonbinary, and women filmmakers who collaborate on cinematic programming and practice.

Rene Yung is an artist, writer, cultural activist, and designer, whose transdisciplinaryworks connect people, place, and history, to articulate the hidden and give form to the overlooked. Founder of Chinese Whispers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to giving voice to the under-told history of the Chinese in the American West, Rene has collaborated with institutions including the Stanford Archaeology Center; exhibited at international and national venues including TransCulture, part of the 46th Venice Biennale, the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and San Jose Museum of Art; and completed public art commissions including from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Awards include grants from the California Arts Council, Creative Work Fund, and Humanities California, an Urban Fellowship at the Exploratorium, and residencies including at Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Center for the Arts, and Hedgebrook Writers Residency. A graduate of Stanford University, Rene is a native of Hong Kong, now transplanted in San Francisco.