Paper Son's Passage 2025

Abstract

Paper Son's Passage (A VR Interactive Experience) In 1903, a fifteen-year-old Chinese boy stood in a Portland jail cell, carrying a secret that could determine his fate in America. His story, preserved in immigration archives, becomes the foundation for this immersive virtual reality experience that blurs the boundaries between historical documentation and surreal imagination. Paper Son's Passage invites viewers to step inside a detention cell from the Chinese Exclusion Act era – but this is no ordinary historical recreation. The room itself becomes a manifestation of alienation, an environment where the familiar turns foreign and the mundane transforms into something monstrous. As a first-generation Chinese immigrant artist, I uncover stories hidden in time through creative narration. This experimental VR experience serves as a portal – an invitation to step inside history's uncomfortable spaces and gather what fragments remain. It exists both as a puzzle to decode and a space to inhabit, where the past haunts the present in forms strange and terribly familiar. Through embodied exploration, viewers navigate the liminal territory between citizen and stranger, between belonging and exclusion, discovering how these boundaries dissolve under scrutiny. Paper Son's Passage offers no easy answers – only an encounter with history's twisted geometries and the human stories concealed within them.