To draw a house is to have seen a ghost. In their debut two-person exhibition at LA Artcore, Coffee Kang and Evelyn Hang Yin employ sound, image, video and installation to position the viewer as a specter of observation. There are no drawings here, however. Instead we are presented with studies of movements that construct and surround the act of drawing as a process of figuration and fabulation. In to draw a house, scenes of natural and cultural landscapes, and occasionally the bodies that move(d) through them, observe histories of Chinese labor, exploitation, and banishment. Instead of houses, Kang and Yin confer with scaffolds, images of ruins, and artifacts. The exhibition title, to draw a house, examines beyond a literal interpretation, and rather towards a suspension of what was (observed) and an imagined future, and thus a space between the conception and the action; a limbo.

By close-reading the Chinese permutation of the title—得運廠—we are further clued into the codes of the show. Upon direct translation, 得 (dé) means “to receive,” 運 (yùn) doubles as “movement” and “fortune,” while 廠 (chǎng) connotes “house,” “factory,” or “casino.” At the entrance of the gallery, a cheeky LED storefront sign reads “歡迎光臨得運廠/Welcome to House of Yun” in alternating Chinese and English. The coinage, “得運廠,” enfolds many key thematic vectors that tether together the histories examined in the exhibition: the movement of immigration, the aftermaths of industrial labor (廠), and a prospect of luck that renders the gamble of survival, that for few, portends to an outlook of attaining (得) fortune (運), and thus a future.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness of the room, various screens and projections of natural and cultural spaces simultaneously carve out and patch in fields of elsewhere. In the video to the left, Aposematic Signals (2024), Kang and Yin foray into remnants of Angel Island, California and Snake River, Idaho, two disparate locations, yet both rife with histories pertaining to Chinese diasporic communities. The artists splice video and audio recordings of both places as a method of world-building, collecting these documentarian musings into a timeline that teeters on the edge of history and fiction (7). Early in the 12-minute video, the artists exchange brief dialogue as they observe something within the sagebrush—what appears to be a structure concealed by a sheet of fabric. “Do you see it?” Yin asks as Kang responds with a thoughtful “no” (3). At times, other inquiries pertaining to the constitution of an observed object (or lack thereof) seem to conjure an air of superstition, a cultural attitude prevalent in the bulk of Yin’s oeuvre.

Further in, videos of varying styles and qualities continue to engage the viewer with a diffraction of space-times: speedboat splash waves, stone ruins, barely legible wall inscriptions obfuscated by layers of paint, still shots of thick brushes, and the uneasy repose of Snake River build upon a sense of place, isolation, and abandonment. Apart from spare moments of dialogue, a potent absence rings throughout each shot. Even when bodies are present, an eerie slowness prompts the onlooker to behold and question a spectral silence and sparsity. Who was here? Who went missing? Who remains?

While not necessarily offering answers to our questions—and neither their own—Kang and Yin imbed their bodies into the contours of these abandoned infrastructures: a standout shot (see below) shows the duo prostrated upon a dilapidated stone wall, a remnant of the long decommissioned Angel Island Immigration Center. Established in 1910, the port severely restricted hundreds of thousands of immigrants from gaining entry to the United States. Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the majority of immigrants who were processed, detained, and surveilled were of Chinese descent (5). As present-day Chinese immigrants, Kang and Yin inevitably contend with these historical spaces as outsiders; the conditions of their personal experiences with immigration, while rooted in the deeply entrenched legacies of post-war U.S. bureaucracy, remain distinct from those of the many who directly lived and died by these subjugations. To avoid, or perhaps bridge, this temporal-experiential problem, Kang and Yin de-center the projective tendencies of identity politics by choreographing a delicate archeology, through which the ghostly occupants of these ruins might speak for themselves.

Closing out Aposematic Signals, an animation of a spinning cluster of stones exposes the structure initially swaddled in opaque fabric. A techno score fades in as the assemblage rotates perpetually; the kick beats as ghostly synths mimic voices, further animating the artifact. The digital sculpture, rendered by Kang, enfolds a photograph of the remains of a rock cobble shelter built by Chinese gold miners that lived and worked along the Idaho-Oregon border (8). To this day, the walls left behind these dwellings pepper Snake River Canyon, still intact; a testament to the hardiness of what was essentially MacGyvered architecture, marked by a diasporic skill and perseverance for “[making] a living out of what was disdainfully cast away” (2). In this final sequence, we are not directly shown the remnants of the mining shelter, but rather a reimagining of that artifact as a shell, whereby interior and exterior, while exposed, are yet preserved and enlivened. Much like armor, the assemblage of stones spins like an item in a computer game, virtually re-envisioned by Kang as a sort of tactical armor, a proposal for future collective survival and resistance that calls upon diasporic methodologies of the past.

In Three Tiers and Six Feet Apart (2023), these methodologies are regarded with an empirical edge. Installed across a scaffold of 4 metal poles that seem to stand in for corners of a room, videos are displayed on two sun-shaded viewfinders. In foregrounding the apparatus here, Kang and Yin place the viewer behind the camera as a witness of both the work and its documentarian process, exteriorizing the interiority of its authorship. In one video, Dark Archives (2023), a pair of hands shuffles through photocopied transcripts of 62 oral histories from Chinese immigrants detained at Angel Island between 1910 and 1940 that mentioned coaching papers. Chinese immigrants used these documents  as a tool of study to pass ridiculously specific interrogations conducted by immigration officers on Angel Island. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, ”thousands of government documents linking immigrants to… Chinese who had already legally entered the US as merchants, scholars, religious officials and sponsored students had been destroyed” (1). This enabled other Chinese immigrants to enter the U.S. by fabricating their relations to “landed,” legal Chinese-American citizens (1).

On the adjacent monitor, a video titled A Study on Passing a Message (2023) presents a stark premise in which two hands duck in and out of each other, passing along what appears to be nothing, but what we might infer from the title as something significant; a kernel of information. The hands are shown repeating their movements with slight variations as intermittently punctuated by the black screen, rehearsing for what may eventually be a critical moment of exchange. The motion folds like sleight of hand: deceptive and decisive in how it conceals its underlying purpose with a practiced agility. Moreover, the gesture reinterprets the strategic utility of coaching papers hinted at in Dark Archives, where an exchange or switch-out of identity undergirds the Chinese immigrant’s survival at the edge of banishment and erasure: a slippage of the official record, tripped by a quiet, rigorous act of resistance.

Whereas the video works up until now are openly displayed on walls or screens, if you have seen it (2024) intimately encloses itself, once again playing on a spacial and conceptual tension between interior and exterior. Affixed to a dark corner, a wooden box with an eyehole beckons private viewership. Peering in, I observe another elsewhere: crystals grown from Borax line the interior of the box, enclosing video footage of China Lake, named after the Chinese laborers who harvested and hauled borax across the Mojave Desert in the 1890s (9). A voiceover—most likely Kang’s—whispers over shots of dry lake bed as if sharing gossip, slowly revealing brief and disparate, yet pointed contexts about its rarefied history. The scene shifts to a nighttime shot of deserted ruins only partially illuminated by sweeping flashlight. One vignette stands out in particular:

“Along the California-Nevada border, thousands of birds fly over an enormous lake that emerges out of the vast desert, seeking water and respite… many end up incinerated by the heat reflected from the lake–millions of solar power mirrors in close range” (4).

In parallel, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrated to America in order to flee from the famine, poverty, and natural disasters that defined a common experience of Southern China at the time, only to be confronted with a particularly different set of extremes brought upon by differences in the West’s climate and the conditions of labor by which thousands were “killed and maimed…in construction and mining mishaps” (8). Following the pointed account, runic shadows quiver to reveal Kang’s camera set up, evidencing the presence of a witness, clued in by the ghost of the documentarian apparatus. The title of the piece, if you have seen it, bears a visual weight here as the work’s tightly crafted immersion is broken for a brief moment of eponymous self-reflexivity.

The closing-in of space in if you have seen it is subsequently juxtaposed by Glare (2024), an installation where a rectangular glass pool submerges an illuminated image of incense, casting reflections on the wall. The ghostly light shimmers over a sublimation print on fabric of inactive firecrackers staked in a lush field, seemingly inert vessels that threaten to burst with the potential of a dream. Here, Kang and Yin revisit the strategy of fiction employed in Aposemantic Signals, where images taken from two distant locations collapse to devise a third space for re-imagining. The photograph of incense was taken at Snake River, where over thirty Chinese gold miners were persecuted and murdered by a hostile Euroamerican majority (8). After the onslaught, “the killers wrecked and burned the camps and then threw the mutilated corpses into the Snake River (8).” A body of water, primarily regarded as a source of life, a vital resource to society, was callously utilized by the perpetrators as a dump.

In Glare (2024), the choice to submerge the image of incense under rippling water not only materializes Snake River on the gallery floor, but reframes its violent subversion—from life-giving to death-holding—by activating the space as a burial ground or gravesite. Here, the ritual object—incense sticks—enters into close proximity with the haunting of Snake River. Although, the gesture does not carry its mourning to completion; incense cannot burn while wet. Whereas planting incense at the site indeed honors the lives that were painstakingly made and violently taken, wetting the image disrupts the ritual. These material interactions, contradictory and incomplete, appropriately reflect an unfulfilled justice. In other words, the material logics of Glare do not so much culminate in a retroactive attempt to course-correct the injustice; they represent it. Even so, Kang and Yin devise a space of recognition and remembrance here, drowned in and haunted by the burden of history.

The firecrackers also appear to be placed near a creek in Luochang village in Hua Yun, a hometown to many overseas Chinese. located in the province of Guangdong, from which a majority of Chinese immigrants hailed at the end of 1800s. In both images, the incense and firecrackers shoot up from their respective riverbeds in an eerily similar fashion. In Chinese tradition, firecrackers are combusted to bring good luck, ward off evil spirits, and celebrate events of cultural significance. In the reimagined context of Glare, the act of planting firecrackers in Guangzhou casts a protection spell of sorts, a talisman of good fortune. Although, here, the firecrackers also read as a symbol of initiation, a kick-off point for an emigration that sought out prosperity in the wake of exploitation, racism and death. The reflections that ricochet off the makeshift pool—the analogous Snake River—dance and weave across the image of Guangzhou, like ghosts looking back on a place from which they once came, glaring at the prospect of a spiritual return.

In Gathering (2024), Yin returns us to a domestic interior, where the theme of the house becomes apparent through a series of spacial negotiations. The improvised installation features an oblique projection that cuts through a corner of the room and lands on a narrow curtain. Warped by the angle of projection, the video becomes a beam of light broadcasted from an overhead window. In the video, the camera pans through the interior of Taoist Temple in China Alley, a historic Chinatown located in Hanford, California. In the mid-to-late 1870s, an influx of Chinese immigrants congregated in Hanford to work on the American railroads between San Francisco and Los Angeles. As the settlement grew, China Alley became a bustling hub for food and trade.

Today, China Alley is largely uninhabited, and stands as a historic landmark overseen by the China Alley Preservation Society (6). In May of 2021, the Taoist temple, which had served as a place of worship for the residents of Hanford, was heavily damaged by arson. The once colorful and vibrant interior of the temple, along with its many artifacts, was effaced and blackened by smoke damage. In Gathering, various archival photographs of long-passed residents of Hanford are projected directly onto the remnants of the main room. Images of Chinese merchants, laborers, women and children illuminate walls and artifacts charred beyond recognition, as if brought in, conjured, to contemporaneously witness, shed light upon, and, perhaps, reinvigorate this place of worship in the midst of its tragic posterity. Through Yin’s summoning ritual, the Taoist Temple acquires new life in its own ash, reanimated by the ghosts of China Alley.

Fire, in its trail of destruction, also touched Mon-Tung, the ruins of a Chinese gold mining settlement within the Snake River Canyon. However, unlike the unanticipated arson that struck only the interior of China Alley’s temple, “the charred remains and deposition of the Mon-Tung site attest to a fire that virtually destroyed the entire structure” (2). Despite widespread damage to the dwelling, surviving artifacts, such as valuable tools, possessions, furnishings, and their utilitarian arrangements were found in 1989 where they were left, abandoned (2).

Was the fire at Mon-Tung an act of arson? What would justify the abandonment of functional mining tools even after the flames had receded? In Ruins of a World, Ronald L. James conjectures that “the sudden death of a Chinese miner would offer… plausible cause” (2). Archeologist Neville Ritchi documents similar customs of ritualistic abandonment among Chinese miners in New Zealand, where “the shelters of deceased miners were burned down if they were situated on or near the mining areas” out of a “combination of respect for the deceased and the fear that [the] spirit, without any family to provide offerings of food and clothing, would become a ghost bearing suffering and bad fortune” (2).

To draw a house, whether it be the act of fabrication or the pull of a panko ticket—the luck of the draw—is an attempt to welcome these spirits in, and in turn, reclaim good fortune for them. While a house is never drawn here, it is reimagined in iterations—as an archive, a temple, a vigil, a body of water, a beam of light, an assemblage of artifacts. to draw a house is an offering—an act of care for the displaced, the banished, the deceased—a place to reflect on and dream their historical legacies into a future, or at the very least, a fortune.