sam soon
class of 2021
Sam Soon is a second year MFA Fine Arts/MA Visual & Critical Studies dual-degree candidate and completed their BFA in Photography & Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Their work centers around trauma’s residue. Tracing waterways, mapping the family archive, and carefully excavating lived experiences, much of their research makes inquiries regarding fragmented memory and the complex ways fragmentation manifests.
Additionally, they are deeply invested in complicating discourses around inherited trauma. Rather, they wonder how we might be able to more expansively engage with the past—shifting the idea that memory is not simply passed down, but perhaps flows both ways. Their research, writing, and art practice attempt to formulate responses to their vibrant community of elders, chosen and unchosen.
Sam’s Thesis
Places to Put It Down: Waste Not, Care, and Family Archives
Art historian Hal Foster argues that archives physically present previously silenced historical information. Meanwhile, writer Joan Soloman illuminates women’s roles as family archivists. However, they don’t address how imperfections bring nuance to the women to assemble these collections. These imperfections come in the forms of dirt, mess, cutouts, and missing objects. My investigation focuses on imperfections in family archives compiled by Chinese women. I begin with artist Song Dong’s collaboration with his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, Waste Not. I bring this into conversation with my grandmother’s photo album to illuminate the personalities of the archives’ creators. Together, these two projects embody self-narratives through their formats and notes. Imperfections challenge the idealization often seen in traditional family archives and reveal previously overlooked aspects of women’s authorship as archivists. Such subtleties not only reflect the archive authors’ identities, they also more deeply reflect their complex humanity.