Friday, April 25, 2024 | 6pm to 7:30pm
25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
In-Person: RSVP | Zoom: RSVP
Family Amnesia (Daylight Books, 2025) is a visual tribute and love letter honoring author Betty Yu’s Chinese American family roots in the United States. The art book explores her family’s multi-generational resilience and resistance through mixed-media collages, her grandfather’s photographs, and own captured images and archival material.
This book project honors the past and current lives of Asian Americans and immigrants in the U.S. by examining the incalculable and traumatic impact that historical events like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act continue to have on the Asian American experience—a painful part of our American history. Yu’s book reclaims that narrative through her own personal family story, featuring her grandfather’s role as a founding member of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of NY, her mother’s plight as a garment worker who became a labor organizer, and her sister’s legacy as a community activist. Though her family story may not be unique, it is part of the larger collective Asian-American immigration experience.
Yu’s book project reminds us that the rise of COVID-related anti-Asian violence is part of a larger history of systemic racism. As the U.S. government and corporate-run media continue to vilify China as a global threat, Family Amnesia recalls the anti-China and anti-Asian paranoia and hysteria that created the policies such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1942 Executive Order that placed Japanese-Americans into incarceration camps. The book also draws visually on geo-political history, recalling narratives that mocked China as the “sick man of Asia ” and demonized the Chinese as a “Yellow Peril.”
Purchase Book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/family-amnesia-betty-yu/1139895825
Author Bio
Betty Yu is an award-winning filmmaker, socially engaged multimedia artist, photographer and activist born and raised in New York City. She holds a B.F.A. from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, M.F.A. in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College/CUNY, and New Media Narratives certificate from the International Center of Photography. She is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-displacement fights.
Yu integrates documentary film, installation, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice. Her work focuses on labor, immigration, gentrification, abolition, racism, militarism, transgender equality among other issues. "Resilience," a documentary about her garment worker mother fighting sweatshop conditions screened at film festivals including the Margaret Mead Film Festival. "The Garment Worker,” an interactive installation, was featured at Tribeca Film Institute's Interactive Showcase. "Resistance in Progress,” a multimedia installation highlighting housing activism in Flushing, was featured at the Queens Museum. Her first solo exhibition, "(Dis)Placed in Sunset Park," was at the Open Source Gallery. Yu won the Aronson Social Justice Award for her film "Three Tours" about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq and their journey overcoming PTSD. Other venues that have screened and exhibited her work include the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, NY Historical Society, Museum of the City of NY, Tenement Museum, Whitney Museum, BRIC Biennial, and MAXXI in Rome.
For nearly a decade, Yu has been teaching video, film, new media, social practice, art and activism at universities such as Hunter College/CUNY, Pratt Institute, John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY and The New School. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Production at Marymount Manhattan College. Her forthcoming photography and art college book, Family Amnesia, will be released in Fall 2024.
