The Vine Street Expressway cuts east-west through Philadelphia's Chinatown like the battle scar it is.
Opened in 1991 after decades of planning, protests, negotiations and construction, the highway stunted Chinatown's natural growth north of the expressway. And it's just one of several urban development projects that have encroached on that ethnic enclave in the past 40 years. Independence Mall, the Philadelphia Convention Center and a major commuter rail station—each project, over the objections of residents, sliced away a bit more of the community.
Chinatown is slowly reclaiming the sparsely developed property north of the Vine Street Expressway, building affordable housing there and hoping for a park. Still, city officials eye the location—part of which is an abandoned railroad viaduct—with designs on the future. In just the past few years, Chinatown's leaders have quashed plans for a prison and a baseball stadium. They continue to fight for control of any future development.
This time, they have art in their arsenal.
Rebecca Hackemann, MFA '96, is installing sightseeing binoculars at three locations in Chinatown. Actually, they are site-seeing binoculars. Each will show what that site looked like in the past and some concept of what it could be in the future. The visions of the future will be developed in workshops and discussions with local artists, residents and students.
“It's a new kind of public art, interactive and site-specific,” says Hackemann, who calls the work Visionary Sightseeing Binoculars. “It will make people think about their surroundings. I imagine seeing a guy walking down the street and seeing the binoculars and thinking, 'I didn't know there was a monument around here.' They'll look through and be able to see future and past visions of that site.
“I'm hoping that (the project) might even be an instrument to influence what goes on that site. It will give people in the neighborhood the chance to think, 'Well, there was a neighborhood here before the expressway,' and to become more aware and involved in plans for the future.”
Her installation is one of four that comprise Chinatown In/Flux: Future Landscape, a project that will be in place from March to June. Sponsored by the Asian Arts Initiative, the project encourages residents to insist on their rights in defining Chinatown, preserving it and deciding about its future. Gayle Isa, executive director, says AAI is grounded in the belief that the arts can provide an important political and cultural voice for Asian-Americans.
Chinatown took root in the 1860s, with the opening of a laundry and, in 1870, the first restaurant. The name Chinatown took hold by the mid-1920s, but the enclave didn't really blossom until after World War II. Though hemmed by development into a compact six or seven blocks, Chinatown pulses like a heart in an otherwise gray business district.
Hackemann's binoculars will be installed at three locations along Vine Street, one looking west at the highway fading into the city, another toward the existing Chinatown, and the third across the expressway to the highly coveted potential development site. Getting permits for the installations from government agencies was part of Hackemann's task: “It is definitely in the nature of public art that there is a bureaucratic component.”Hackemann's artwork—whether drawings, photographs, artist's books or installations—has always been about vision. She examines how a piece of art changes depending on the viewer's psychological as well as physical perspective.
“Looking and seeing and the history of perception and vision is something I've always researched,” says Hackemann, 36. “We often don't realize that different people, looking at different things, might each see something completely different.”
Often, the painted or drawn portion of her works can be seen clearly only through a stereoscope or by standing so as to see reflections in a mirror. She points out that European artists were originally in the same crafts guild as lens and mirror makers. One of her works, The Autopsy of a Historian, reflects the changeability of history over time. “It's all about what is real and what is perceived and how much of that is involved with time.”
Born in Germany, Hackemann claims London and New York as her artistic homes. She teaches at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. After the Philadelphia installation is dismantled, she hopes to recreate it in Iowa. The focus will be on farmland, examining issues that affect land use, including food production, genetic engineering, pesticide use and biofuels.
SUSAN CABA, a Knight fellow in 1997, is a journalist based in St. Louis.
