Memorial to the Victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre
Penjing is a Chinese art form and ancestor to Bonsai in which the garden becomes a microcosm that focuses the visual and mental gaze towards introspection. Often seen as living sculpture or physical poetry, it embodies a cultural attitude towards sculpture as something existing between object and landscape, and is regarded as an extension of surrounding built and natural environments. With the sites of the massacre scattered amongst sidewalks and parking lots, Penjing is able to serve as both a compact sculptural object and evocative space. Scaling to fill each site and protected by a quiet vessel, each Penjing offers ritualized care to unassuming places that often lack it, with its microcosmic interior serving as a mirror of the communities who design and sustain it. Penjing are further linked to Asian Angeleno communities through the flower industry as a result of past racist policies. They not only survive but thrive in residual spaces, in keeping with stories of resilience many Chinese immigrants trace in the building of their communities.
The outer vessel of our proposal is a honed cylindrical form shaped from locally sourced limestone, emerging from a hewn base. Three openings carve away its thick exterior to reveal an inner void sculpted with 18 polished flutes, each memorializing a victim of the massacre, collectively centered upon a hidden garden. The memorial becomes a vessel within a vessel; the cleft and honed exterior takes on a scholar-stone ethos of embracing weathering and wear, while the inner polished form references the subtle lobes of a Chinese celadon bowl. In this nested vessel, the memorial becomes a space of absence, where loss nurtures a garden growing in the face of adversity. This balance between ruggedness and refinement, protectiveness and vulnerability, suggests a spirit of resilience that we see as both poetic and pragmatic. One’s experience of the memorial’s layered frames builds upon Chinese spatial traditions of implied thresholds and gates, and its excavation and discovery become a visual and performative analogue to the palimpsest of Los Angeles’ own complex histories.
We see remembrance as a constant and ongoing act rather than something sacred and unchanging. As such, in resistance to rigid interpretations of history and memorialization, we imagine the garden within the memorial to be a space and scene to be grown and renewed by its surrounding community. By setting a living landscape as the memorial itself, the act of remembering also becomes one of care.
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Client: Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles
Year: 2022-23
Type: Memorial
Size: 64 sf sculpture on a 2,500 sf plaza
Status: Finalist
Team: Figure x Studio J.Jih (Artists), Silman Structural Solutions (Structural Engineers), Quarra Stone Company (Fabricators), MOLT Studios (Renderers)
Press: The Architect’s Newspaper, artnet News, LAist, Los Angeles Times, and Domus.