Seeing and remembering: Rene Yung's art installations set out to capture experiences of migration.

At first glance, artist Rene Yung's solemn yet intimately familiar mixed-media installations appear to address the idea of diaspora--particularly considering Yung's work with immigrant communities, which has inspired some of her most provocative art. But when you dig deeper into the many layers of her pieces, they're less inspired by immigration than they are by issues of community visibility. "My work isn't merely about immigration or identity politics," says Yung, who emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States as a teenager. "I'm interested in concepts that are woven into the very fabric of American life."

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Yung, a recipient of the prestigious Creative Work Fund Award, worked as a graphic designer in San Francisco for about 10 years but in 1990 turned to art full time. In 1995, her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

About four years ago, Yung found a niche--this time, in Seattle, with the Artist Residencies Transforming Seattle's Urban Places (ARTS UP) program. The program teams community groups with artists to explore issues of identity and environment. Yung was paired with Kawabe House, a HUD-financed facility providing both low-income housing and a senior citizen center for residents, most of whom are Japanese and Korean immigrants. Yung recorded over a hundred hours of oral histories with the seniors, and designed a series of 16 postcards based on the stories of the Kawabe community. Entitled Postcards in Time, the multimedia installation is composed of the postcards, photographs and community narratives. People talked about experiences of immigration, and each postcard has a caption on the back that earmarks the story being told in the image.

At first, the elderly immigrants were reluctant to have Yung interview them. Their reaction, Yung recalls, was "Who, me? I'm nobody." Once they saw the installation, however, they felt visible, Yung says. Some even commented to her that "they should do a book about us."

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Yung's Postcards in Time demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of her approach and ranges from ink drawings to photography. The postcards are eerily intimate in their illustration of issues such as nostalgia, aging and home--with the trademark simplicity that informs Yung's conceptual and poetic response to the undergirding stories. Teeming with images that are as immediate and tactile as they are remote and fuzzy, the pieces lie somewhere between the wispiness of dreams and the concrete anguish of cultural isolation, which is appropriate to Yung's interest in cross-generational work as a bridge between past and future, fantasy and reality.

This year, she exhibited her piece,... nges & disappearances, which was commissioned by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum, Idaho to explore the missing history of the 19th century Chinese immigrants who worked on building the Transcontinental Railroad and in the mines of the American West. At the pinnacle of the labor boom, Chinese immigrants comprised almost 30 percent of Idaho Territory's population, but rapidly disappeared from the area after the completion of the railroad.

Like much of Yung's other work,... nges & disappearances is an interactive installation. A low wall of 385 soap bars, each stamped with the word "remember," is placed before a line of towels. Viewers are invited to take one of many towels strung on a line and imprinted with words of official status, such as "legal" or "illegal." The viewers then wash their towels with bars of soap in wash basins. As the soap is removed from the wall, a life-sized charcoal drawing of an historical photograph featuring a Chinese laborer appears piece by piece, phantom-like, in the empty spaces. The exhibition also traveled to the Salt Lake City Art Center, but given the conceptual and physical temporality of the work, "over time, the word 'remember' on the soap is erased, and the words on the towels disappear as well," says Yung. "It's meaningful that in the act of [the viewers] remembering, the memory fades."

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Nirmala Nataraj is a Miami-based theater and arts critic.