LOS ANGELES | 2023 | CULTURAL
Penjing is a shortlisted design for the Memorial to the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871, which began with a decision to resist and recast the use of design in comparison to the era of the Massacre and of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In the aftermath of these events, architectural design was deployed by Chinese Americans for self-defense; Chinatowns became exotified caricatures in an effort to amuse, and defuse violence. Over generations, this alienated diaspora from their own culture, with many knowing only the kitsch as their own. In the face of COVID-linked xenophobic violence, we set a first imperative: for design to be utilized in resistance to this history. We reject the use of symbolic imagery, and instead support culturally specific practices and modes of reflection. We examine the proportion of an altar, the thickness of a Chinese garden wall, the organic forms of view apertures, the texture and scale of meditative objects – spatial qualities that might be familiar to the diaspora. These became a set of geometric, material, textural, and proportional values that we began to gather under the term, Cultural Forms.
Penjing centers upon a garden, serving not only as a place of respite and reflection, but also reconnecting “civic memory with notions of maintenance, fidelity, and care.” 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 relational 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. Views of the memorial within are as such deliberately overlaid with views through to the surrounding context and of other visitors, framing site, community, and memorial in equal parts. The cleft and honed exterior takes on a scholar-stone ethos of embracing weathering and wear, while the inner polished form presents a dignified surface for memorialization — aiming to suggest 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 the meditative cultural values placed on looking through organically shaped openings towards miniaturized landscapes within.
Team: Studio J.Jih x Figure (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.