Messengers—Yanbin Zhao Solo Exhibition

2026/01/08- 2026/01/15

In the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires, the widespread destruction of municipal birth records produced the conditions for what later came to be known as the “paper son” phenomenon. Large numbers of Chinese migrants entered the United States by purchasing or assuming false identities that claimed familial ties to U.S. citizens. In response, the federal government established the Angel Island Immigration Station in 1910 as a primary site for regulating and restricting immigration, particularly Chinese immigration. There, Chinese arrivals were subjected to prolonged, highly detailed, and adversarial interrogations designed to expose inconsistencies in their claimed identities. To pass these examinations, migrants carrying assumed identities were compelled to internalize meticulously constructed fictive biographies—lives composed in advance and memorized as if lived. Within Chinese migrant networks, coaching books became essential tools for survival within this exclusionary immigration regime.

The exhibition unfolds around a 16mm film projection installation alongside a series of images. The film imagines the moment when coaching books inscribed with false identities and invented lives are passed into the hands of Chinese immigrants facing interrogation. Drawing inspiration from Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of “minor histories,” Messengersconsiders how history might be retold in ways that unsettle official narratives and systemic violence. Through a reexamination of “paper son” histories from the era of Chinese Exclusion, immigration interrogation archives, and historical imagery, Zhao Yanbin’s moving-image, photographic, and installation-based practice attends to the mutability of identity, the visibility and invisibility of historical experience, the politics of affect, and the urgent significance of reclaiming the power to narrate.

Artist Bio:

Zhao Yanbin is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and curator whose practice explores labor, memory, language, and diaspora, navigating the liminal spaces between the visible and the ineffable, the translated and the untranslatable. His work has been presented at Image Forum Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, LUX London, REDCAT, and Los Angeles Filmforum. He is the co-founder of 飞蚊 mosmote, a collective dedicated to independent and experimental cinema through screenings, workshops, and publishing initiatives.

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