FACTION zine
March 21, 2007

Interview with Stephanie Syjuco
By Clare Haggarty,
in conjunction with the “Faction” exhibition
California College of the Arts, Playspace Gallery, San Francisco, CA

You were born in the Philippines and then moved to the Bay Area, right? How old were you? Why did your parents move here? What was it like for them to adjust to American culture?

My family has had a long and complicated relationship with America, as do most Filipinos, actually. In the 1930s my grandfather hopped a ship from Manila and was a migrant farmworker in California for years before returning home. When WWII broke out he fought on the side of the American Army and was granted US citizenship. As a result all his children—my mother included—were born American but lived in the Philippines.

I was three when my (single) Mom moved us to the States so that she could pursue a professional career. Apart from general growing pains, I think the transition was rather  smooth because she already identified as “American.” Most of my life was spent as a Filipino citizen, however, and I was only naturalized as an American citizen when I was twenty-six.

In general, however, Filipinos are quite fluent in American culture (or at least their “translation” of it). For over a century, the two countries have had a rather porous one-way relationship being that the Philippines was a US colony after the Spanish American war. There was even talk of making it a US state at one point because of it’s strategic military position in Asia, but that was quickly dropped when the reality of all those “poor brown people” flooding into America freaked people out.

You mention in your MFA thesis [for Stanford University] that you feel Americanized and not readily accepted as Filipino by other Filipinos and even Filipino-Americans, how have you worked through this in your artwork? Does your work continue to address this?

I went to a public high school in San Francisco composed primarily of first-generation immigrant kids. There was a term used for those who didn’t identify in a “proper” ethnic way:  “whitewashed.” So Filipino kids would call me this because I couldn’t speak Tagalog and didn’t participate in their cliques. I think immigrant families do one of two things when they come to America: they either find a tight-knit community within their same ethnic background or they attempt to assimilate as much as possible, to the point where they don’t pass down language or cultural specifics to their children. The latter happened to me and that was very unusual within the Filipino community, which prides itself on cultural fluency, and can act extremely clubbish and insular towards those who are not.

I’m very curious about the idea of “cultural authority” and who gets to claim the boundaries for it—in other words, who gets to be “Filipino,” either by American standards or Filipino standards. The idea that I am not a “correct” Filipino is something I’ve been more interested in playing with recently. It’s been about trying to explore the murky area of cultural authenticity and even the fictions we create for our own cultural allegiances.

The irony is that the Philippines itself is an incredibly hybridized place, with Spanish, American, Chinese, Portuguese, and other influences. There is no such thing as a “true” Filipino, perhaps just as there is no “true” American. In the past few years I’ve started using more overt images of people and places, so some have taken it to mean that I’m only now addressing these issues, but I think I’ve always been dealing with how one can claim agency in owning an “incorrect” or “wrong” identity.

Can you talk about the parallels with the bootleg trade in the Philippines and your own exploration into making counterfeit goods? You coined the catchy term, The Hello Kitty Effect, can you explain this as well?

I like the idea of counterfeits—things that are not “correct” but traveling in a parallel, alternate mode of exchange. Counterfeits look and at times act like the real thing, but fall outside sanctioned flows of capitalism. In the Philippines, as in many other places, counterfeit consumer items are rampant: music, movies, clothing, handbags, etc. It’s a matter of supply and demand, really. First World corporations create a desire within Third World countries for these images and objects but place them out of economic reach, so a sort of DIY approach springs up to satisfy the masses. Counterfeiting subverts the proper flow of money to the corporations and while I’m not necessarily advocating it, I see it as a form of resistance to economic power structures.

In 2006 I started The Counterfeit Crochet Handbag Project, where I solicited crafters to counterfeit designer handbags using the “low” form of crochet. I set up a website and urged people to handmake their own versions of expensive, glamorous accessories. Crochet is an incredibly “analog” or low-tech medium, and the resulting “translations” of the designer handbags has been amazingly creative and rich in terms of putting to use each maker’s skills. The project has been very well received and I have folks from around the world participating in, as I call it, “debasing” the designer object.

The “Hello Kitty Effect” is my way of referring to this type of bottom-up “mistranslation” of consumer culture or designer product. It originated in a hand-stitched Hello Kitty doll that I bought from a woman street vendor in Mexico a few years ago. She had made it from scraps of fabric, and although it bore just a passing resemblance to the “real” Hello Kitty, it served as a vehicle for all the cuteness and glamour the original stood for. It was a funky and homemade bastard, a counterfeit. For me it was a powerful icon of how a resourceful and even resistant approach to economic limitations can manifest in the everyday world.

Faction is a combination of the words fact and fiction. How would you define faction in terms of your process?

I’ve been speaking of my work as exploring fictions and that I am constantly creating fictions of myself. Some of my practice has included “covering” (as in what a musical “cover band” does) other artists’ artworks, remaking them but changing them enough with my own style or materials. In attempting to blur the line by challenging who the “real” author of the artwork is, I’m trying to explore the idea of a fixed identity as opposed to a fluid one that morphs and changes depending on circumstance. The term faction is exciting for me because I interpret it as a way to acknowledge the agency each of us has in creating our own idea of ourselves and what we stand for—it’s all part fact, part fiction. Fiction-making is an incredibly powerful tool since it creates a potential space for difference and a way to reorder or remap your place in society.

You are exhibiting a work for the Faction exhibition at CCA’s PlaySpace Gallery that explores native heritage, tourism, and western culture’s view of the rest of the world. I am grossly oversimplifying so please can you talk about the background of your piece in the show?

I think of my piece “The Village (Small Encampments)” as an almost ham-fisted attempt to fantasize about the Philippines—to project onto my own domestic home the idea of a “homeland,” but consisting of small cut-out dioramas made from tourist photos I find on the internet. To me the project is funny, poignant, and oddly pathetic or even just plain wrong. These images of people and landscapes are supposed to be connected to me in some way, and I’m trying to figure out exactly how they are and are not, and how much of it is my own exotification of a real place and space. Embedding the cutouts of villagers right into my home was a way to create a literal junction between two homes: the domestic space and the fictive idea of  “homeland,” as a way to see what frictions would happen. The work is time-based and goes back and forth between being a documentary of my home environments and a place that could be far, far away, but is really a construct and fantasy.

Going back to the idea of not being a “correct” Filipino, I like to think of myself as being a counterfeit Filipino as well. As far as I’m concerned, I make up and play with my ethnicity and allegiances all the time. I don’t see this as a negative, but more like a way to harness the reality that through fantasy and perhaps even a dose of self-exoticism, I have attempted to cobble together an idea of where I came from. Some people find it odd that I don’t feel melancholic or disenfranchised by not being able to speak with any cultural or ethnic authority—like if only I had a richer, more “authentic” cultural experience as a Filipino I’d somehow be “whole” and centered. On the contrary, I think it’s a potent place to begin to talk about the slippery area of our own self-fictionalization. In his thesis writing, Visual Criticism student Weston Teruya uses the metaphor of the pirate and piracy as a positive way to describe having no fixed country allegiances, as if you were a free-floating agent able to carve out your own way in the world, sans defined territory. I love the recklessness of the term.

Now some fun questions:

What fictional book or movie character would you like to be friends with?
Ishmael Reed. Oh, oops, he’s real. Still, I’d choose him.

What is your favorite artificial flavor?
Lime. As in jell-o. Yum!

Virtual Reality or Artificial Intelligence?
Either artificial reality or virtual intelligence would work.

Reality T.V. or blogs?
I’ve been reading a lot of blogs lately. For a while I was a big reality TV person just because of how completely orchestrated and un-real it was, but it got quite boring rather fast. I’ve been wanting to start a blog written from the viewpoint of a fictive character. I really like how we assume personal blogs are subjective, heart-felt and true experiences.

Fict or Faction?
Faction. Yup.