All I Asking for Is My Body: unique works by Binh Danh

Binh Danh’s series All I Asking for Is My Body (2024) consists of daguerreotypes made on antique colonial-style silver platters. Drawing its title from Milton Murayama’s 1975 novel, the project examines the histories of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, and African laborers exploited by American plantation systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Danh sources vernacular photographs and stereographs depicting plantation labor and oversight, images shaped by what scholar E. Ann Kaplan has termed the “imperial gaze.” By transferring these photographs onto silverware, objects emblematic of colonial wealth and domestic power, Danh inverts this gaze. The reflective surface draws the viewer in, linking the present to histories of forced labor, dispossession, and loss of bodily autonomy.