There are hundreds of little bundles of colorful cloth, a crazy quilt of texture and pattern, tied neatly with string and heaped along a 25-foot expanse of floor at the Pao Arts Center in Chinatown.
For Yu-Wen Wu — the Center’s current artist-in-residence — this mound of bundles, though colorful and even rakishly piquant, tells a much more complicated story than what is perceived at first glance. Each bundle, sometimes emblazoned with a note or message, is representative of the thousands of stories of women and children grappling with issues of immigration, resettlement and displacement, often due to war and famine.
The bundles “call attention to material objects and cultural ideas that individual immigrants were able to bring with them or were forced to leave behind,” Wu says. “They are the embodiments of narratives of crossing borders, of surviving terror and violence and the loss of family and home.”
