By Wing Young, Wing Young Huie Photography Gallery

The University Avenue Project (UAP), a six-mile exhibition of photographs taken by me and produced by Public Art Saint Paul, officially ended Halloween night 2010, but the ripple effects continue. In December, I traveled to Beijing, China for the opening of an 80-piece traveling retrospective reflecting my 35 years of photographing the American cultural landscape, culled from 12 projects, culminating with UAP.

The exhibition, facilitated by Arts Midwest and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, has since been in the cities of Xi’an, Wuhan, Dalian, Guangzhou, and Shanghai. Part of the impetus was to show from an artist’s perspective the realities of everyday life in America. This was a propitious opportunity, for it was my first time in the Motherland—everyone in my family was born in China except me. I was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota.

Much of what drives my work stems from my experiences of growing up in a culture where inside I felt I was like everyone else, but on the outside I stuck out. Not surprising since there was little in the popular culture that formed me that mirrored people who looked like myself, mostly just kung fu stars. So my photographs are an attempt to fill in the visual gap between who we are as Americans and what is represented in the media, entertainment industry, and advertising.

We are what we see. It took me a long time to fully realize that my main ethnocentric filter is white. How could it be otherwise in the land of the Vikings, Lake Wobegon, and Mary Tyler Moore? But I am often perceived otherwise. Growing up in Duluth strangers would ask, “Where are you from?” “Duluth,” I would reply. But that answer would usually not satisfy because the follow up was, “No, where are you really from?”

China is the answer people want. So it is with that complicated back-story that I went to China for the first time. It was interesting to be in a place where I looked like everyone, but inside I really felt like a foreigner. Strange. However, much of my personal ethnocentric issues have been since worked out and I felt comfortable and welcome by Chinese who were as curious about my life as a Chinese-American as I was about theirs as native Chinese.

In Beijing I gave several slide-show presentations and at Tsinghua University, known as the top university in all of China, one student stood up and gave an emphatic response that left his fellow students nodding, perhaps crystallizing the value of my exhibition and echoing Bulgarians: “But, you are showing us images of what America really looks like, not the rich paradise that we know it is!”