Chinese-ness: The Meanings of Identity and the Nature of Belonging [Hardcover]

Is Chinese identity personal, national, cultural, political? Does it migrate, become malleable or transmuted? What is authentic, sacred, kitsch? Using documentary and conceptual photographic strategies, acclaimed photographer Wing Young Huie explores the meaning of Chinese-ness in his home state of Minnesota, throughout the United States, and in China.

Huie, the youngest of six children and the only one born in the United States, grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, where images of pop culture fed, formed, and confused him. At times his own parents seemed foreign and exotic. His visit to China in 2010 compounded the confusion: his American-ness made him as visible there as his Chinese-ness did in Minnesota.

To make sense of his experiences, Huie photographed and interviewed people of Chinese descent and those influenced by Chinese-ness. Their multifaceted perspectives project humor and irony, as well as cultural guilt and uncertainty. In a series of diptychs, Huie wears the clothes of Chinese men whose lives he could have lived, blurring the boundary between photographer and subject.

How does Chinese-ness collide with American-ness? And who gets to define those hyphenated abstract nouns? Part meta-memoir and part actual memoir,Chinese-nessreframes todays conversations about race and identity.National and regional publicity in arts, culture, lifestyle, politics, social justice and ethnic publications including: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, ArtForum, American Photo, Time, Buzzfeed News, VICE, NPR, Cultural Survival Quarterly and major city dailies.Wing Young Huie is an award winning full time professional photographer, author, and the owner of Third Place Gallery in Minneapolis. Born in Duluth, Minnesota to an immigrant family from China, he always wondered what life would have been like if he had been born and raised in China.Features documentary and conceptual photography exploring race and identity in Minnesota and China.Huiel3¦