This video installation, “Peanut Butter Pizza” is built on the personal and social history of the artist. Diana draws on her family history as a second generation Chinese American whose family suffered under the oppressive regime of Maoist Cultural Revolution. She draws personal diaristic and memoir methods to rewrite and reclaim intergenerational trauma.
The video projected combines many elements. First, there is a computerized narration of diary entries written recently reminiscing about the artist’s parents immigrating to America. Second, there are the visual video elements of Instagram story snippets (ephemeral social media posts that disappear in 24 hours meant for quotidian journalistic documentation) filmed when the artist first moved to New York City at the same age that her parents were when they moved to America, as well as subtitles of “subtext” for the narration.
The artist’s parents are Chinese immigrants growing up in the cultural revolution of the Maoist regime who were in Beijing as college students marching at the TiananMen Square Massacres, a historic tragedy where the Chinese regime massacred groups of student protesting for liberty and democracy.
The film meditate on the gaps in place and the legacy of ideals instilled in American politics. At the end of the film, the narrator recounts a time early on after moving to a small town in rural Washington where they had heard of a uniquely american delicacy--the pineapple on pizza. Yet when they tried to call the pizza delivery shop and ask for it, the pizza they got delivered to their home was a pizza with peanut butter on it.
In this installation and film, the peanut butter pizza acts as a metaphor for the gap between the ideal and the reality, of the American Dream, of escaping oppression and in turn coming to a place with other kinds of oppression.
Peanut butter pizza acts as an anchor for this piece and physical manifestations of this in the form of the pizza boxes on the wall, the pile of flour and peanut butter on the floor serve as an assemblage of motifs and objects from the video to create of immersion of the memory and shame and history. There are also subtle gestures to a surreal subway car but also the sleaziness of a strip club. This liminal border of space that picks up on the bodily and materiality of peanut butter and painted walls echoing colors in the film all serve to create an overwhelming sensorial cacophony. This information overload echoes the experience of the immigrant but also the second generation child of an immigrant that has to negotiate between dual spaces.
