Our video call began in a rush. She was tucked somewhere at the foot of New York’s towers, unsure when she would be able to leave work, and could only “slip downstairs for a while to chat” between tasks. On the other side of the screen, she had just graduated from the Photography programme at Parsons School of Design. She was living in Long Island City, New York, working as a photography assistant, shooting social media content, and continuing to make her own work.

She described herself as a “happy puppy”. Once people get to know her, her friends find her warm. But her work is nothing like that: black-and-white bodies, gauze wrapped around flesh, broken images, performances staged in dim rooms. They leave the opposite impression.  “A lot of people thought I was a gloomy b** when they first met me, but it turns out I’m just a very cute girl, ” she said with a laugh.

This dislocation is what makes Alicia so compelling. Unlike artists who wear pain on their faces, she often speaks about heavy things as if they were ordinary. She places into her work all the things she would not usually say directly: the gaps in her childhood left by moving to America alone at thirteen, the forced early independence, the silences repeatedly avoided within the family, and the entanglement between her mother, grandmother and three generations of women — something that cannot be contained by a single word like “love”. 

When Alicia was in ninth grade, in her room in Minnesota, she saw the once-mythic Alexander Wang leave Parsons and step into the fashion empire. That moment felt like a kind of calling. Someone from Asia could enter that seemingly distant world, and place their name in the glamour fields of New York and Paris. For the young Alicia, this was a very concrete fantasy. But isn’t growing up, after all, a process of disenchantment? Alicia gradually realised that fashion design did not fully belong to her. Coincidentally, the name that had once symbolised the possibility that “an Asian person could enter the fashion empire” also began to lose its halo in 2020. It was only when Alicia took a tiny Nikon camera and started shooting randomly on the streets of New York that, after once or twice, she suddenly thought: this seems to be something I like.

At the beginning, Alicia was not even familiar with exposure or film. Later, she met a very strict professor at Parsons, who taught her how to look at images and how to judge why a photograph works. It was also from that point that she slowly realised the subjects she returned to most often had always been her mother and grandmother. It took enormous courage for her to make the photography project Scarecrow.

For this, she began asking her grandmother. Her grandmother was born in Shanghai in the late 1940s, and lived through the turbulence of China’s revolution and the repeated turns of family fate. Many things had never truly been spoken about before. Under Alicia’s questioning, her grandmother began to talk, and then began to cry. Later, Alicia found a letter on the last page of an old family album. It was written by her mother to her grandmother when her mother was twelve and living alone. When Alicia read that letter, she almost immediately saw herself. She had left China at thirteen and arrived in America at a very young age. Memories of New York, Minnesota and the pandemic came flooding back. She felt as if she had been exiled thousands of miles away from her family, yet remained tightly bound to its emotions.

“In my memory, the love from my mother and grandmother manifested through their sacrifices and their pain, not through any emotion that could be conveyed with words. Perhaps my mother carried this same feeling during her youth, and perhaps my grandmother did too — this I cannot know, and maybe even they themselves were unaware of it. Yet, since childhood, I have had a feeling, one that now grows even more intense, that they passed on to me, whether consciously or not, the pains and joys inherited from the generations before them,” she wrote.

She did not choose to point the camera directly at her mother and grandmother. Instead, she collected images of plane trees in Shanghai, footage of the old family home, decaying buildings and other elements, then projected them onto the performers’ bodies.

“Scarecrow unfolds across three stages: performance, photography, experimental music, and alternative process. Family histories are carried, repeated and quietly transformed across generations within domestic rituals and private emotional landscapes. Documented in video, the performers’ bodies become a vessel for lived and inherited trauma. Photography captures stillness as a way to freeze memory, and archival family photographs appear through sound and projection as traces of family history. The final stage involves physical manipulation of the image, how memory fractures and fades over time,” she explained.

In the first video, the performance resembles a life that has just been born and has already lost its mother, carrying a kind of terror that has not yet found language. The performer is naked, wearing finger condoms on his hands and tiny glittering gems on his face. They resemble amniotic fluid, pacifiers, and a decoration so fragile that it becomes excessive. At first there is confusion, which slowly turns into aggression. The infant becomes an alienated being forced to survive on its own.

In the second video, the performer unwraps the medical gauze binding her chest and head, as if waking from an illness, or trying to break free from the body itself. The third video could have moved towards a darker ending. Alicia initially considered an ending close to “killing myself”, but later turned instead towards rebirth. In the third act, the body is covered with a white cloth. At first it cannot be seen clearly. Then it keeps knocking, struggling, tearing, and finally returns to a state that feels more innocent and more tender.

Alicia projects her own pain onto the performance, then, through photography, video, the darkroom and transfer processes, takes it back into the work. Rather than a simple expression of trauma, this feels like a dangerous ritual. She lends the body to image, the image to memory, and memory to a self that has not yet fully healed.

She is not too worried that others will read her work simply as “Chinese female trauma”. She feels that Scarecrow is not so direct. “Its existence is something you cannot immediately see,” she said. “If a person can face the past honestly and use it to make work, I think that is very courageous. If you criticise me for consuming my own private trauma, then I would say I am not doing something bad. I would say I deserve credit for that courage.”

Alicia does not want to pretend that art can easily save anything. She believes that rather than forever pretending trauma never happened, it is better to let it exist in some form in the world. This sense of boundary also appears in her street series shot in Long Island City.

Alicia lives in LIC. She said that when she first came to New York, LIC in 2017 was not what it is today. Now, there are more and more high-rises, rental apartments and corporate residential towers, serving one wave after another of young people and Asian international students moving in. In her memory, Queens was more local, and older. Low houses, delis, bridges, barbershops, immigrant communities, Chinese, English, Spanish, and people of different skin colours mixed together. Compared with the gloss of Manhattan, this was the rougher texture of New York.

She feels that the things being pushed away by gentrification in LIC need to be remembered. She walks into barbershops, talks to people on the street, and encounters those who do not usually appear in city promotional images: a local who sells weed, people experiencing homelessness, sex workers, and young men passing the afternoon in front of a deli. She has also been in danger before, once cornered by two strange men. “I’m really very bold, and sometimes I somehow get in trouble,” she said, laughing as she recalled it. “But many people are willing to tell me their stories. For me, you have to understand a person first before you can take a good photograph.”

But she knows there are ethical questions in street photography. She said people lying unconscious on the street absolutely cannot be photographed. She prefers to speak to people first, to tell them what project she is working on and why she wants to photograph them. She feels that if a photographer is only consuming another person’s poverty, suffering or marginal position, then that is far more complicated, and far more dangerous, than using one’s own pain.

Beginning with family, Alicia extends her lens towards those in the city who are also being overlooked. She photographs bodies, and she photographs neighbourhoods; she photographs trauma, and she photographs the way a place gradually changes its skin under capital and time. What she cares about has always been the things that do not enter mainstream narratives, yet truly shape a person, a city, and a family.

Alicia said that making Scarecrow was like “breaking and rebuilding”. This is also why she was ultimately drawn to images that were cracked, peeling and imperfect. Because memory itself is broken. So is family. So is the body. The things a person inherits from previous generations are rarely whole, clear or clean. More often, they slip through one’s arms like sand, leaving behind only a trace that is almost impossible to hold. Just like the people and stories slowly disappearing in Long Island City.

She is the person who turns on the light in a room, leaving dust with nowhere to hide. The old photographs, gauze, projections, sounds, cracked paper surfaces and struggling bodies are all saying the same thing: some pain has not disappeared. It has only found another form in which to live.

And Alicia Zhu is trying to call it back through photography.

Journalism by Beryl Baiyao
Artist: Alicia Zhu