Office Space Collective (CV)

The Office Space Collective consists of over ten artists including Justin Watson, Sumire Skye Taniai, Madison Donnelly, Kathi Schulz, Ryne Ormond, Bryce Chatwin, Chunbum Park, Albert Abdul-Barr Wang, Sajeda (Saj) Issa, Melissa Prosser, Tika Ardellya, Tim Melton, qi peng, and other personages as a group of conceptual artists, writers, and thinkers. The group’s projects represent the realizations of an unstable, subversive, and rotating forward-thinking posse focused on various, disparate site-specific projects. The collective has exhibited previously at SHRINE and Office Space and will be featured in an upcoming issue of Studio Visit Magazine.

Artist Statement

In their new monograph, the Office Space Collective asserts that white supremacy and bigotry are as American as apple pie. White supremacy is the main ingredient to this American recipe of oppression and genocide, and it has tacitly and sociopolitico-economically been enforced and collectively experienced throughout history in the form of slavery of African Americans, the genocide of the Native Americans, the mass incarceration of African Americans and Latinos, the whitewashing propaganda of Hollywood movies and their glorification of white people, the simultaneous sexual disenfranchisement of Asian men and the fetishization of Asian women, and the total dehumanization and the annihilation of the people in the other parts of the world during the Cold War and the War on Terror.

While America is a powerful country that is run by democratic principles, she has committed an original sin by being founded on the graveyards of the Native Americans and the labor of the African American slaves. Time and time again, we have seen that the laws of democracy and freedom usually apply in an advantageous manner for the white people and the wealthy/powerful; these rules and principles sometimes apply to the colored people and the poor in a disadvantageous manner.

(While white people can be poor, and the wealthy/powerful can include colored people, most wealthy people are still white, and racism causes colored people to become invisible unless they are wealthy/powerful. For the purpose of writing this essay, I will count the Jewish people of European heritage as being "white" and the powerful/wealthy as well, although I am fully aware of the rampant anti-Semitism among the lower class whites.)

In fact, it is highly suspect that the founding fathers of the American democracy never meant for the equal participation of colored people within the government and the society since many of the founding fathers were slave owners. It is ludicrous for Americans, whether they are conservative or liberal, to suddenly stop and pretend that America is or ever was a country where equality, law, and freedom were fully achieved; white supremacy has always been the American experience and an American reality. Conservatives know it, and liberals hate it, but it's the truth.

Since the very beginning of this country, you weren't really American unless you were white. America is a "western" nation because it's a white nation. This is why President Joe Biden once said that the United States has its roots in the Greco-Roman tradition and not African. Yes, I agree that America is a western nation. It's a western nation because being western means being European, and being European means being white.

What Americans want and what white people want is for America to stay predominantly white. Colored people can exist in this country, but they must remain as side characters, within minority roles. This is why for the conservatives, immigration is such a big issue because they don't want the demographics to change from a white majority to a colored majority. In Hollywood movies, especially the war movies with the heroes fighting the bad guys, it's just a white paradise. There are literally no colored people in the movies except as few side characters.

America is a white paradise, just like Disney World used to be before they let in Middle Eastern and Black princesses (I acknowledge that progress is being made). It's supposed to be a western nation, although all the lands originally belong to the Native Americans. It's a western nation because colored people must remain side characters and minority populations within the national narrative. I strongly suspect that the Ivy League schools discriminate against students of Asian descent precisely because they want their campuses to remain predominantly white, despite the overwhelmingly superior academic performance of those students (and a holistic assessment of "personality" and other attributes is essentially racist because it allows for a subjective grey area by which the racial quotas are maintained).

In my opinion, the racist white psyche is highly vulnerable and immature. Ultimately, it wants to control and win. It cannot imagine or accept any other outcome than to be the biggest, strongest, fastest, smartest, and the most beautiful. That, to me, is a sign of immeasurable weakness and a sign of inferiority. If the Europeans were indeed superior to the Native Americans, they SHOULD have fought with inferior or no weapons because they didn't need superior weapons... because they were indeed "superior." Instead, they conquered all of the natives' lands by CHEATING with superior weapons, which had been developed within a highly competitive, wartime environment of Europe.

The biggest myth of all is that the Native Americans or the Africans were somehow "inferior" because they had inferior weapons. While the natives did indeed fight each other as all people and nations do, the military, political, and social environments of the Americas and Africa were less competitive and did not necessitate the development of more advanced weapons. Simply put, some native people chose to live on the land without forming a centralized government that would extract taxes from the people, while other native people comprised larger nation states and empires (such as the Aztecs and the Incans) that dominated their respective regions and negated any meaningful competition from their neighbors. The latter was also true in East Asia where China was traditionally the dominant country, which partly explains why China had inferior weapons and lost the Opium Wars against Great Britain.

White people believe in this myth, that the gun-wielding Europeans colonized all of the Americas, and that they were superior to the natives precisely because they had guns. This is why so many white gun-loving fanatics exist in the United States, and the preservation of the Second Amendment is a main priority of the NRA.

White supremacy and racism exist even if white people are nice or claims to be "not racist." White supremacy and racism are more like climate rather than weather. Actually, the perfect analogy would be the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You cannot pinpoint its exact location or other attributes, but it's there in the overall picture, like an electron cloud. Racism is there in the atmosphere even if the white person claims to not be a racist. In fact, the white person has no right to call himself or herself not racist. Only a colored person can call a white person not racist. Only a colored person can truly tell if the white person is racist or not racist. They are guilty until proven innocent. In the context of racism, the legal theory works the other way around.

But back to my point - first, America commits genocide and slavery. Then she makes progress by freeing the slaves. But every progress is followed by a step backward, such as the Jim Crow laws, exclusionary zoning (to keep the populations racially divided), mass incarceration and police violence, racial quotas at elite schools, and more. And all of this brings us to this point, in which we have the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, the LGBTQIA+ movement, and the Stop Asian Hate movement.

Some people might say that these movements are a sign that America is a land of freedom, democracy and equality. That's a highly optimistic view in my opinion, although I want to share this sense of optimism. The reality is that these movements plus the historical precedents with the Women's Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement comprise a delicate thread of balance in the American public and political discourse. These movements are a sign that there is a promise of progress, but they are also a sign that there are a lot things that are wrong with America, and they need fixing right away. Every time a progress is made, the Empire Strikes Back loudly or silently behind the scenes, working to break down the foundations of the made progress.

America is a country where corporations are people, the super wealthy pay less taxes than the middle class, and the middle class doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. America is a country where the millionaires are bought out by the billionaires to support and maintain their interests. The lower and middle classes are sheep for slaughter, with their rights to unionize attacked and denied rights to a livable wage.

The eagle or the fox or whatever predator the elites fancy themselves to be can never be satisfied. They always want more, and they want everything for themselves. They want immense inequality to be maintained so that they can retain greater power relative to other people of the lower classes, and they can live like kings made possible with an unthinkable amount of money, influence, and power. They will even try to live forever by funding research that makes organ harvesting and aging reversal possible.

The cancer that is inequality which is plaguing America has its origins in racism and white supremacy. White people wanting to live like kings. White people stealing the land from the Native Americans and enslaving the African Americans. Now the ultra-wealthy and powerful are doing the exact same thing. They refuse to pay any taxes and claim to provide jobs to the working class while simultaneously exploiting them with unlivable wages.

Oh they are powerful. Oh they are kings and queens. Oh they are simultaneously the eagle and the dragon. (They think) They are brave, strong, cunning, beautiful, and all the good things. They also have money, power, and influence. And the American experiment for democracy, equality, and freedom has failed undeniably.

If you are truly powerful, don't rig the rules of the game to your favor and not pay any taxes. If you are truly a king or a queen, have some heart and pay the working poor a livable wage. If you are the eagle or the dragon, and you are strong, cunning, and beautiful all at the same time, work towards greater equality as the founding fathers envisioned America to achieve. But you will never make such a move because you are a coward, you are not powerful, and you are not a brave eagle or tiger.

You are self absorbed in your image, as both the master and the savior of the world. You make excuses to why many people have not succeeded while you have. You know white is best. Jesus was white, or at least you only believe in a white Jesus.

Who am I to criticize America? Who am I to lecture the ultra-wealthy and powerful? I am a nobody.

But I happen to know racism and white supremacy. Every day, I had direct experience with it growing up as an Asian in America, and I still see it every now and then.

I see it in my white "friends" who act super nice in person but ignore all of my greetings online. I see it in women who refuse to date Asian men. I see it in white people who treat me like an invisible person or a wall decoration at social events.

My high school friends predicted that I would become a serial killer because I was Asian, and I was mistreated by everyone. I absolutely hated America, and I nearly could have become a criminal, but I became an artist instead. In my journey to become an artist, I met many kind and loving people along the way. Despite the difficulties in my past, I see a light at the end of this dark tunnel.

While I share with the Office Space Collective's sense of disillusionment, and I have railed against America for much of this essay, I will end on a positive note. While inequality, racism, and white supremacy are embedded within the collective American psyche and experience, so are the aspirations for democracy, equality, and freedom based in the rule of law. These are two opposing sides to the American narrative. Unlike other oppressive countries such as China or Russia, the ideas of democracy, equality, and freedom are embedded within the vocabulary of the national political and social discourse. While a politician in the US can lie and deceive, s/he is forbidden from directly using words that attack the principles of democracy, equality, and freedom for the sake of another priority as in the other countries.

This crucial difference is why there is great promise in the American experiment for democracy. Already the dominant national narrative and the political and legal language are all for the democratic principles that founded this country. The language that the founding fathers may have meant in a different capacity is inherently embedded within the political and social framework, and it can always be relied upon to call for or justify progress for all people.

So perhaps the next step for the Office Space Collective is to investigate this language of freedom and equality that has its roots in the philosopher John Locke. America is a battleground between the good and evil, but the good is fighting on its home turf.

—Chunbum Park