Jeffrey Yoo Warren: Seeing Lost Enclaves

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is working to support the preservation of America's Chinatowns. Sign our petition today to commit to the cultural preservation of America’s Chinatowns for future generations.

"... I'm the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress for 2023-24, and I'm working on a project which digitally reconstructs early Asian American enclaves and other enclaves of color across the United States."

"... And as an artist, my work has really developed from that starting point into a project about these hidden spaces and what they mean to Asian Americans today."

"I think one thing that this project has helped me to understand is when I didn't recognize the degree to which I did live in Korean American community.   I used to live in Union Square Somerville in Massachusetts, and within a few blocks of my front door, I had a Korean grocery, Korean laundry, a restaurant, a video rental shop.

I think my history and connection to Asian American enclaves and often specifically Chinatowns, really pushes me to think about the way that different Asian American communities develop a sense of place and communal identity, group identity, today in the sense of a city in a neighborhood and things like that. I've learned more and more about early Asian American communities and the ways that they constructed community, they built community physically and otherwise. I think that's been something I've really been thinking a lot and direction that  my artwork has been going in."

A key part of Yoo Warren’s work at the Library of Congress involved building a Relational Reconstruction Toolkit, a set of guides that would provide techniques for others wanting to create an “immersive (virtual, 3D) reconstruction of an erased neighborhood."

Modeling

In Yoo Warren's Modeling tutorial he walks users through the process of building structures using visualization tools and archival records. Each of the three clips below shows the ways in which Yoo Warren built the model of Providence's Chinatown.

Atmosphere
The Atmosphere tutorial looks at creating “emotional space-through lighting, weather, textures & movement.” Yoo Warren worked with Alicia Renee Ball, a multidisciplinary artist and designer to create a sense of place. As Yoo Warren describes, these elements create an "emotional tone."

Soundscapes
The Soundscapes part of Yoo Warren's tutorial is in collaboration with artist Ann Chen. As Yoo Warren states, “Adding sound to your reconstruction can be a powerful method to augment a visitor’s experience of your space and also reconnect with memories and histories.”

"One thing I noticed because I live in the neighborhood, is the constant hum, which I guess it must come from all the different heaters and air conditioners and things. And on top of that, you know, Empire Street, it's a pretty big street now. So, almost no matter when you go, there'll be some traffic and it's not moving very slowly. But I did notice there were some birds. There were some small trees."

"Surprising, even in the middle of March, it's pretty cold, and I can hear myself breathing and breathing in this cold air, and there's some kind of motor going over by the big building over there. So, then you know, I was thinking, well, the road, it's much bigger. It's a asphalt road. And then you know I thought, would there be a road nearby that's closer to what it would've been like? So next I went over just a couple blocks towards the Jewelry District and I stopped when I heard a lot more birds. I mean, there's some bushes, small trees, some vines, and they were really making a lot of fuss, and there was a dog bark. There was just signs of more like residential life."

Yoo Warren presented at the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Annual Conference, PastForward. In addition to walking the audience through his toolkit he talks about other ways, as an artist, that he has tried to bring Providence, Rhode Island’s Chinatown back to life.

"I'm often facing this sense that the places and the communities and the people I'm studying, the situations that they're in, often violent, definitely involving displacement, that those things could happen to present day communities like Chinatowns and is currently in the process of happening. I think it's a particularly urgent form of gentrification among other forces because of how precious and important, especially Asian American enclaves are, and how relatively rare they are."

"Many people are trying to reconstitute communities, whether that be digitally or physically or in other forms through mutual aid, things like that. And so I think that Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves represent a lot of surviving community networks and institutions, and relationships that have been damaged many times, but still exist. And so I think that this sort of turn towards community is tied up in the Preservation of those places as well."

This story has been developed in collaboration with Jeffrey Yoo Warren. Immerse yourself in Yoo Warren’s work to recreate Providence’s Chinatown and how he hopes to work with other communities as part of his Innovator in Residence project at the Library of Congress.  

Learn more about the National Trust for Historic Preservation's America's Chinatowns initiative.

About the author: Priya Chhaya is the associate director of content at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.