Poetry for the ghost of yesterday

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Poetry for the ghost of yesterday is a body of work consisting of video performance and a collection of scanned poetry text. By performing a traditional Chinese Sacrifice ritual, the artist opens a channel of communication with the “ghost” from his adolescence, the incarnation of guilt from his past actions. As the artist reads and burns the poems written on joss paper, he reveals the story of a newly arrived, “fresh-off-the-boat” immigrant and his effort to “Americanize” himself that leads to the unavoidable perplexity in his life. This work expresses  difficult issues, such as the reality of hardship of life as a foreigner in the U.S, the feeling of rootlessness for an urban sojourner and the Chinese American’s struggle with post-colonialism and internal racism.