Ada Chen, a recent graduate of Pratt Institute, shares what it means to be a Chinese American women with her jewelery designs — from racially-charged “Text Message Earrings” to a headpiece that pinches the temples, creating a slanted-eye look.
The “Text Message Earrings,” selling for $160 a pair on her website, went viral last month for capturing both the fetishization of and ignorance towards Asian American women. What drew people to these earrings weren’t just the color or the shape, but the honest text engraved into the blue and green speech bubbles.
According to Chen, they’re based on real conversations she’s had — one over text, and one in a New York City apartment. One begins with “Are you Asian or Chinese?”, while the other contains the eye-rolling line, “I’ve never been with an Asian girl before.”
In an interview with The Fader, she said she wanted to turn these conversation into physical material, something more lasting than a screenshot or a memory. “I was like: How can I put it into a jewelry context, more permanent, with higher value? I think the permanence in the earrings makes it more impactful than just a screenshot because that is so fleeting in social media, [where you] look at a picture and go,” she said.
Another popular piece are her “A.B.C. [American Born Chinese] Brooches” — delicate gold stars engraved with compliments in Mandarin characters such as “You’ve gotten paler!” and “You can speak Chinese!”. In creating these brooches, she explored the standards of being a first-generation Chinese American with immigrant parents and relatives.
Chen’s artwork is tongue-in-cheek about earnest social issues. For example, she created grillz (silver tooth covers) that responded to a recent wave of viral Youtube videos of White Americans demanding that Americans of other ethnic backgrounds speak English in public. The grillz are carved with Mandarin characters; they read “Speak Chinese We’re In America”.
“In a country where immigrants are significantly contributing to its livelihood, many conservative Americans love to tell people of color who speak languages other than English to ‘speak English’ in order to make these POC feel like they don’t belong,” Ada said to Refinery29. “I even said it to my Cantonese-speaking friends once when I was young and hadn’t realized that I thought this way because I didn’t want to seem like I didn’t belong myself.
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