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Wing Young Huie
Description
Whether in large-scale public installations or major museum exhibitions, Wing Young Huie creates up-to-the-minute societal mirrors of our changing cultural landscape. His first major project in 1995 focused on Frogtown, one of the oldest neighborhoods in St. Paul and home to the largest Hmong community in Minnesota. After two years photographing hundreds of residents immersed in their various daily rituals, Wing installed a groundbreaking outdoor exhibition on a vacant grass lot in Frogtown. Mounted on Styrofoam panels and shrink wrapped in clear plastic, this vulnerable exhibition in a stigmatized urban neighborhood generally thought of as the “ghetto,” commingled thousands of viewers from the surrounding areas with those from outside the city who normally would never venture into the urban core.
Wing’s most well known work, Lake Street USA, transformed six miles of a Minneapolis thoroughfare into an epic photo gallery. After photographing everyday life for four years in the fifteen neighborhoods that bordered this singular street, 675 photographs, ranging from 11 x 14 inches to 8 x 12 feet, were installed in store windows, bus stops, on the sides of buses, and on the sides of a building along Lake Street in 2000.
That year the Minneapolis Star Tribune named him “Artist of the Year” stating, “Lake Street USA is likely to stand as a milestone in the history of photography and public art.” In 2008 it hailed the resulting book, Lake Street USA, as one of the 25 most important books ever published about Minnesota.
Another project, Looking for Asian America: An Ethnocentric Tour (2007), explores the funny, touching, and sometimes strange intersection of Asian America and American cultures. From one of the United States’ most diverse areas (Hilo, Hawaii) to its least (Slope, North Dakota), Wing and his wife Tara spent nine months traveling through 39 states on an “ethnocentric” tour of their homeland. Some of the sights include: a Vietnamese Elvis, a Hmong street sign in rural North Carolina, a meditating Falun Gong protestor, a bubble tea valley girl, ABCs (American-born Chinese), FOAs (fresh-off-the-airplane), and a self-described “red-neck” Chinese restaurant owner near the Okefenokee Swamp.
