Our Island
Residency Project Plan
In 1994, I made my professional debut as a child actor in the musical South Pacific. At the age of 10, I performed the fictional role of a half-French half–Polynesian boy on an exotic island 8 performances a week, transporting audiences to a fantasy world filled with themes of racism, interracial love, nationalism, and war. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical — which received both the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950 — ignited my deep interest in artistic expression and world building that continues to this day.
In 2008, I created the Society of 23, a fictional mysterious brotherhood of 23 gentlemen all portrayed by me. The Society of 23 is the conceptual foundation of an ongoing body of work that examines the construction of a society and the complexity of self-portraiture. For nearly twenty years, I have manipulated photographs, appropriated readymade sculptures, and designed immersive installations as artistic manifestations of the magical world of this secret brotherhood.
In 2025, I discovered the reality competition television show Survivor. Thanks to on-demand streaming services, my days and nights were filled with the voices of starving and sleep-deprived players narrating each episode’s story through physically demanding obstacle courses, chaotic game strategy, dramatic instances of uncertainty, and picturesque sunrises in Fiji. The ground-breaking television program — which debuted in 2000 with 16 American players, none of whom were of Asian ethnicity — revamped its casting outcomes in 2020 with a diversity initiative that required at least 50% of the cast to be BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). The players’ determination and adherence to the constructed reality within the game within a television show reminded me of the excitement and wonder I experienced when performing in South Pacific.
Both the musical and the television show present American ideas of identity and power — South Pacific through the exotic lens of World War II, Survivor through the allegory of tribal warfare. As the Stuart B. and Barbara Padnos Distinguished Artist-in-Residence Chair, I will create an artful mashup of my early experiences as a child performer in South Pacific and my current obsession with Survivor resulting in a new narrative grounded within the world of the Society of 23.
I am interested in using these specific cultural references as material to investigate how stories of racism, love, war, and American belonging are rehearsed and performed in American culture. South Pacific sings and dances through a midcentury optimism shadowed by racism and the politics of interracial love, while Survivor dramatizes twenty-first-century anxieties through strategy and deception. By combining them within the existing mythology of the Society of 23, I will create a multimedia body of work that culminates in an exhibition celebrating how fantasy and competition become stages for negotiating identity, intimacy, and power.
This residency will be a period of exuberant research, experimentation, and production. This project traces the arc between my experience as a child actor in South Pacific over thirty years ago and my experience as a fan of Survivor today. With this project’s final presentation, I invite audiences to ask themselves how their own memories and media consumption continue to script who they are and influence how they belong in society.