ANDREW KUNG, A RIVER ONCE DREAMED
“In A River Once Dreamed, I recompose the Hudson River School’s romanticized paintings of the river valley by staging scenes of Asian American men casted along the Hudson. Each constructed scene - while challenging the iconography of the American landscape - recontextualizes the relationship between nature and belonging, identity and masculinity, and history and erasure.
Historically, the national landscape - depicted through the lens of Manifest Destiny and the paintings of the Hudson River School - has signified a collective and imagined cultural identity that dictated participation in the natural world. Despite major contributions on American land - constructing the Transcontinental Railroad, advancing the nation’s agricultural infrastructure, pledging allegiance in war - Asian migrants and their histories remain largely misrepresented and invisible.
Through intimate scenes of friendship, the casted subjects are reimagined as cultural citizens of America’s first iconic landscape, the Hudson River Valley, and are ultimately reclaiming and contesting the history of land ownership, power, and their stake in the American pastoral.” - Andrew Kung