Burning History is a site-specific installation operating on several levels of investigation into 5000 years of Chinese history. Excavations of burial sites from early China have advanced our knowledge of her religious and sociological nature. The invention and development of paper in China (Eastern Han Dynasty -- 105 AD) not only established the economic and communicative development of the Empire, but also created new religious practice in ancestral worship by substituting wealth and acquisitions with surrogates made of paper which were ceremoniously burned as representations of worldly status to sustain the needs of those departed in the afterlife. The annual ritual of burning "money and necessities" to maintain one's ancestral obligations has been revived in mainland China today, surviving attempts to eradicate the old class-conscious Confucian customs of the past during the Communist Cultural Revolution. My interest in historical paper processes has motivated me to reposition the function of this religious material into a contemporary visual arena. Burning History also defines a new direction in my work, initiated with a solo exhibition, One Billion Ghosts in 1996, a previously related installation addressing personal issues important to researching and understanding my Chinese heritage. My parents were born in China and immigrated to America in the 1940s to Fargo ND, a lonely Midwestern community with little Asian presence. My parents completely assimilated into this Scandinavian-Germanic culture, joining the Lutheran Church to guarantee their acceptance into this unfamiliar place. Their willingness to fit into America affected my childhood environment, where I grew up learning little of my obscured background except for superficial stories surrounding my family and faces in photo albums. This "cultural amnesia" had recently directed me to focus on the concept of memory and how one defines a loss of ethnic identity. In this installation, I have transferred appropriated photocopy images of ancient Chinese funerary objects and other Chinese cultural icons with solvent onto paper laminates made of partially burned brightly colored "joss papers" and printed charms and amulets used to ward off evil or procure good luck. Other paper joss assume the role of "spirit money" or gold and silver ingots to supply the deceased relative with annual wealth to buy their way through the spirit world. These photocopy images are transferred by hand -- a process I relate to historic ink rubbings of sacred steles, cave walls, and bronze vessels, soaking into the paper substrate as a ghost-like impression. The process of layering these images alludes to my interest in archeological excavations and the literal stratification of artifacts locked in time. Everyday objects fashioned out of paper can also be found today in Chinese communities for ritual burning -- anything from cans of beer, televisions, clothing, and cars, to cigarettes and computers. I have extended this idea by taking found objects upon which I have laminated high-shrinkage translucent paper pulp to embalm and neutralize them as a kind of displacement from their real function and context. This paper shell absorbs and assumes the objects role in this site-specific arrangement as a metaphoric replacement of itself similar to a snake about to shed its outgrown skin. The spatial context of this installation is binary, where "possessions" are assembled for a Chinese peasant on one side of an image-infused curtain, and the overt accoutrements of an Emperor on the other. This comparison of class structure based upon providing the dead with their necessary baggage to survive in the Chinese afterlife suggests a social dichotomy that theoretically continues from reality into the spirit world. The polarity of class also might comment upon the totalitarianism of Communism, which restricts personal freedoms today -- an attitude ingrained in Chinese civilization since the beginning of dynastic rule. The first emperor, Ch'in Shih-huang-ti, united China at the cost of her people who suffered under tremendous oppression and were recruited into the construction of the Great Wall with a great loss of lives to construct a political boundary drawn in the real and the abstract.   -Paul Wong 12/22/97   Note: Paul Wong's work is also featured in the Market Arcade Public Art space.   Born in Fargo ND in 1951, Paul Wong studied photography and graphics at Moorhead State University in Minnesota (BA 1973) and (MFA 1976) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, concentrating in printmaking and papermaking. He moved to NYC and became the artistic director at Dieu DonnÈ Papermill Inc., a non-profit arts organization where he was master papermaker, artist collaborator, educator, who has exhibited internationally and has been a visiting artist and lecturer throughout the United States. In 1997, he received a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and was invited by the Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase to create "Burning History". This year he will be included in "The State of Connection", at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum, Neenah, WI to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Papermaking, an exhibition of Wisconsin-affiliated artists working in paper today.