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LISA TANG LIU: VISUAL ART PORTFOLIO
AMERICAN FAMILIES
I noticed an increasing number of young Chinese girls around me with non-Chinese parents, and I came to learn about the orphanages in China and the reasons why so many girls were abandoned. I looked at these girls with their new parents, and my first reaction was that they were lucky, lucky not because of the warm clothes and expensive toys in their new homes, but because of the love they were showered with by their American parents, after being abandoned at birth. But because I am not yet a parent, what wasn't immediately intuitive to me before this project started is that the parents are very lucky too.
I was a little girl from Hong Kong at nine, a naturalized American citizen at seventeen, and a Chinese American woman at thirty-five. From the moment my plane from Hong Kong landed at Kennedy, I have wondered what it means to be a girl, a woman, a Chinese, an American.
In my self-funded photography project AMERICAN FAMILIES, I intend to photograph the girls with their families once a year for a minimum of five years. I am interested in the girls’ developing self-identity and self-awareness of their unique positions, and the ways in which they express them.
I was a little girl from Hong Kong at nine, a naturalized American citizen at seventeen, and a Chinese American woman at thirty-five. From the moment my plane from Hong Kong landed at Kennedy, I have wondered what it means to be a girl, a woman, a Chinese, an American.
In my self-funded photography project AMERICAN FAMILIES, I intend to photograph the girls with their families once a year for a minimum of five years. I am interested in the girls’ developing self-identity and self-awareness of their unique positions, and the ways in which they express them.