What comes to mind when you imagine an A sian American face?

 

Hooded eyelids, flat nose, black hair, yellow skin? The face that comes to mind is likely singular — and East Asian. We are surrounded by stereotypes that flatten the diversity of Asian America into a single look. 

 

Here is what this reductive image ignores: the existence of not only the diversity of Asian American ethnicities and cultures but also the existence of mixed Asians. A huge piece of the mixed race experience centers around the sense of un-belonging that arises from having racially ambiguous physical features. This is exacerbated by the fact that others, too, are deeply uncomfortable with their inability to racially categorize them, often going out of their way to ask questions like “what are you?” –– a question that I guarantee every mixed Asian person has received.

 

Asian America is not one look — and it’s also not one thing. As deconstructionist scholar Lisa Lowe argues in her landmark essay Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity, Asian America is an unstable construct that binds diverse, multiple peoples, identities, cultures, classes, and generations. There is no one “Asian American.”

 

We are mixed-race Asian American students who believe that our existence proves the instability of an essentialist understanding of Asian America. Our mixed and multiple faces, which exist across spectrums of racial identity and often resist easy categorization, prove that there is no one face. Though a portrait photography project of mixed race Asian students, we aim to show that there is no one Asian face. Our subjects have curly hair, dark skin, pointy noses, deep-set eyes, and they are Asian too.

 

MIXED is a photo campaign centered on the faces of mixed-race Asian students at Yale. We capture portraits of roughly seventy mixed-race Asian faces, all photographed with the same background and arranged in a grid. By standardizing the background of the portraits and displaying them in a large grid, our goal is to visually emphasize both the individuality and collective identity of the mixed-race Asian community. The visual impact of identical portraits, appearing as one unit, emphasizes a singular shared identity. However, the standardized background also ensures that the focus of the portrait is on the individual, which draws attention to the vast diversity of our subjects’ features.

 

The project aims to expand our collective definition of what an “Asian face” looks like.