We are pleased to present Chinese Pioneers: Power and Politics in Exclusion Era Photographs. This temporary exhibit explores Chinese Californians' social, political, and judicial disenfranchisement and moments of Chinese agency and resilience in the decades before and after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The exhibit runs from July 14 to September 3 at the Angel Island Immigration Station. It examines how photography played a potent role in Chinese people’s interactions with the dominant culture and in the government’s fledgling systems of registration, identification, and surveillance.
The exhibit begins in the Gold Rush era when significant Chinese people first arrived in California. Anti-Chinese sentiment led to protests, violence, and vigilante expulsions up and down the West Coast. The Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from immigrating, becoming citizens, and tightened restrictions on previous residents reentering the country. The exhibit considers the broad range of nineteenth-century imagery depicting the first generations of Chinese Californians and how visual culture influenced, aligned with, and diverged from the politics of Exclusion and the state's actions.
The exhibit features examples of how different types of photography (studio portraits, street photography, and surveillance) reflect different facets of the Chinese experience. While studio portraits presented a dignified image of the subject, street photography highlighted the unequal social relations that existed between the Chinese and non-Chinese populations. Government headshots were used as a tool in the suppression, surveillance, and criminalization of Chinese residents through registration and identification systems. Together, these varying photography styles shaped the perception of the Chinese in the Exclusion Era years.
Exhibition Support
Chinese Pioneers is an exhibit by the California Historical Society and touring through Exhibit Envoy. Institutional support was provided by San Francisco Grants for the Arts and Yerba Buena Community Benefit District. The Henry Mayo Newhall Foundation supported the first 6 bookings of this exhibition.
About the California Historical Society
The California Historical Society (CHS), California's official state historical society, has been collecting, sharing, and honoring extraordinarily diverse stories from throughout the state for 150 years. Headquartered in San Francisco with support from California Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, Yerba Buena Community Benefit District, and all of its donors and members across the state, the nonprofit organization works statewide to inspire and empower people to make California’s past a meaningful part of their contemporary lives.