No Place

Middleland is an exhibition consisting of a two-channel video and a series of four paintings that, together, explore the nuanced circumstances of East Asian diasporic migration in Middle America, and the resulting social and cultural transformation, diversity, and complexity. The title refers to both Middle America and a positing of one’s Chinese-American identity “in the middle” of China and America, something that scholar Ien Ang describes as a feeling of “in-between-ness.”

The body of work is centered around Ba’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, a city that occupies a unique position in its mythologized and elusive reputation to urbanites (think of the snowballing online joke amongst Gen-Z-ers, “only in Ohio''). Recently emerging as a commerce, tech, and banking hub in an otherwise decelerating post-industrial Midwest, Columbus presents itself as a sort of refuge of comfort—on its way to becoming a cultural destination while still retaining a certain Midwestern humility. However, its status as a hotly contested swing state facing issues like police brutality, settlement upon Native land, abortion rights, and an alienated working class, while also experiencing a growth of concentrated wealth and a comfortable suburban middle class make Ohio a ground zero for ideological tension.

This mix of qualities also helps to achieve a certain statistical American averageness and a sort of complacency that, for decades, has drawn in large immigrant populations to search for an antiquated paragon of the American Dream. The tension between Ohio as a destination for multiculturalism and Ohio as an embodiment of the traditional suburban values of the Midwest is where Ba’s interest lies—the figurative paintings that accompany the video work portray Asian female figures in environments that are drawn from personal memory and are distinctly White, distinctly Midwestern. She is also interested in a critique of multiculturalism as a neoliberal objective, most palpable in her video work, ‘24 Hours in Middleland.’ As Jared Sexton writes, "the principle political effects of multiracialism are neither a fundamental challenge to the living legacies of white supremacy... but rather the reinforcement of long-standing tents of antiblackness and the promotion of normative sexuality." Middleland asks the question, how do contemporary efforts towards White standardization and diasporic migration interact?