Harmless: to be proven

Harmless: to be proven uses staged photography to reveal the hidden precarity Chinese and Chinese American scholars face in U.S. academia, showing how surveillance, mistrust, and political suspicion turn fear into everyday life.

Harmless: to be proven examines the long-standing and often invisible precarity faced by Chinese and Chinese American scholars in the United States. Drawing from interviews, observation, and my own experience moving through physics and engineering programs, the project looks at how academic life becomes shaped by surveillance, institutional mistrust, and the aftereffects of federal investigations targeting Chinese and Chinese American researchers.

When I first arrived in the U.S. to study physics, I believed academia existed at a distance from politics. Over time, that belief became impossible to maintain. I began to see how easily a scholar could be turned into a political symbol, how a small mistake could be read as suspicion, and how fear could settle quietly into the routines of research, teaching, and institutional life.

Documentary photography felt insufficient for a condition that is often psychological, bureaucratic, and invisible. Instead, I use staged photography to build narrative tableaux from shared unease. In these scenes, scholars move through classrooms, laboratories, offices, and other institutional spaces shaped by control and uncertainty. Exaggerated gestures, suspended actions, and slightly surreal relationships between bodies and objects give form to pressures that are rarely visible but deeply felt.

Absurdity plays a central role in the work. It makes the images more approachable while sharpening their tension. Through constructed scenes, Harmless: to be proven reflects on how institutional power turns uncertainty into an ordinary condition, one many scholars are left to endure in silence.