- Gallery Text
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Envisioned as a parody of marketing campaigns, Chung’s portfolio addresses how increasing tourism in the Caribbean has obscured the legacy of colonization and slavery. The disembodied portraits of vendors and agricultural workers are based on archival photographs of emancipated individuals in 19th-century Jamaica. Leveraging the weight of the printing press as a metaphor for the resilience of day laborers, Chung imprinted their silhouettes using a debossing technique, heat-pressed into the paper to create indentations. Each figure wields the tools of their respective trade, but their legibility is compromised via cropping, amplification, and pixilation to disrupt associations with sleek advertisements.
Each lithograph features quotations found in popular travel magazines. However, Chung, of Jamaican and Trinidadian descent and Afro-Chinese heritage, is also inspired by Indigenous linguistic traditions. One caption in the local dialect of Jamaican Patois expresses the speaker’s private delight in teaching foreigners colloquial phrases, but never directives such as “Go back to work.”
- Identification and Creation
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- Object Number
- 2018.33.4.4
- People
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Andrea Chung, American (Newark, NJ born 1978)
- Title
- And fortunately, completely unchanged
- Classification
- Prints
- Work Type
- Date
- 2010
- Culture
- American
- Persistent Link
- https://hvrd.art/o/361183
- Location
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Level 3, Room 3500, Special Exhibitions Gallery
View this object's location on our interactive map - Physical Descriptions
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- Medium
- Debossed offset lithograph on white wove paper
- Technique
- Offset print
- Dimensions
- 55.9 × 38.1 cm (22 × 15 in.)
- Inscriptions and Marks
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- Signed: l.r., in graphite: AC 2010
- watermark: right bottom edge: Watermark: somerset / ENGLAND
- inscription: l.l., in graphite: 6/22
- Provenance
- Andrea Chung, created 2010; [Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia, PA], sold; to the Harvard Art Museums, 2018.
- State, Edition, Standard Reference Number
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- Edition
- 6/22
- Acquisition and Rights
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- Credit Line
- Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund
- Copyright
- © Andrea Chung
- Accession Year
- 2018
- Object Number
- 2018.33.4.4
- Division
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- Contact
- am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
- The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. To request a higher resolution file of this image, please submit an online request.
- Publication History
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Annie Paul, "Not Slavish Reproductions", The Gradient
- Exhibition History
- Related Works
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This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
