A four-week creative research project for DNCE 668 (Advanced Topics in Performance of Hawaiʻi) with Kumu Hailiʻōpua Baker. The project examines how three museums, the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, the British Museum in London, and the Musée du Louvre in Paris, stage Hawaiian ancestral objects through radically different spatial, linguistic, and institutional grammars. Working from the position of a triple outsider (non-Indigenous, non-settler, international student from mainland China), I spent one week building the conceptual frame and filming at Bishop Museum, one week conducting fieldwork in London and Paris, one week sorting several hundred photographs and archival materials, and one week editing. The final output is a sixteen-minute documentary video essay, Returned on Loan.
3.8
The Origin of the Frame: Kumu Haili's Classroom and an Uncomfortable Question
This project did not begin as a research design. It began as unease.
This semester I am taking Kumu Hailiʻōpua Baker's DNCE 668, Advanced Topics in Performance of Hawaiʻi. The early weeks of reading left me with a question I could not put down: who am I, and on what grounds am I sitting in this classroom reading these texts.
Stillman writes about kuleana, the responsibility of guarding knowledge. Baker distinguishes performance-as-commodity from performance-as-sovereignty. Crawford traces the politics of the tourist gaze. Kahikina and Desha Enos ask who gets to define "local." These texts were not written for me. They were written from a Hawaiian standpoint and for a Hawaiian future. I am an international student from mainland China on an F-1 visa, neither Indigenous nor settler nor local. A triple outsider.
I assumed at first that this position was a limitation. Then I began to suspect it might be an analytical tool. Precisely because I do not fit any of the available categories, I can see what the categories themselves are doing.
On March 16, I went to the Bishop Museum. I did not go with a research question. I just went to look. What I saw in the Hawaiian Hall was something I had not seen elsewhere. The kiʻi stood on stone. The light was low. The labels were bilingual, Hawaiian first, English second. Quotations from Mary Kawena Pukui, James Poaha, David Malo, and Isabella Aiona Abbott were printed directly onto the wall panels. The authoritative voice belonged to them, not to the institution.
In that moment I understood what I could and could not do. I could not make a project about Hawaiian culture. I do not have that standing. What I could do was make a project about the museum as a machine for looking, about how different institutions use space, language, and light to determine how a visitor sees an object.
That does not require me to be an insider. It requires me to be an honest outsider.
3.16
Fieldwork: Bishop, British, Louvre
In the span of one week I entered three museums. Two of them, the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, I reached during the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa dance ensemble's international performance tour. The fieldwork happened in the gaps between rehearsals and performances.
March 16. Bishop Museum.
The kiʻi stood on stone. Low light. Bilingual labels. The object was not being displayed. It was simply there. In the Wao Lani gallery on the second floor I photographed a vitrine and only noticed later, on review, that the glass held a reflection. A figure in a cap holding a phone. That was me. The only moment in the entire project in which I appear in my own record.
March 21. British Museum.
Hawaiʻi: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans. A temporary exhibition. The first sentence on the entry panel read: the making of this exhibition has been shaped by members of the Hawaiian community, who worked closely with the British Museum. I read it three times. The grammatical subject is "the exhibition." Hawaiian community members appear in the subordinate clause as modifiers. The sentence has already decided who is host and who is guest.
Inside the exhibition stood a stone figure from Mokumanamana. The label noted that in 1894 a British naval survey ship's chaplain, Griffith, "collected" the object. Collected. In museum English this may be the cleanest dirty word available. What it covers, the label does not say.
Next to it sat a wooden bowl. The label stated that in 2024 the bowl returned to Hawaiʻi from London on loan. Returned, but on loan. The smallest line at the bottom read: earlier provenance unknown. Island unknown.
March 23. Louvre.
I had checked the Oceania archive in advance. In the entire Louvre, a single object is attributed to Hawaiʻi. One. It sits on the lowest floor in the farthest corner, case number 17, a figure alone in an otherwise empty vitrine. While I stood there people walked past and laughed. More than one. They mistook it for contemporary performance art. No one had given them enough context to understand what it was. The French label read États-Unis d'Amérique, archipel d'Hawaiʻi. United States of America, Hawaiian archipelago. At the time this figure was made, Hawaiʻi was a sovereign kingdom.
One week, one class of objects, three placements. I took several hundred photographs. I did not yet know what they could argue. I only knew that the differences between them were not differences of lighting.
3.24
Materials: Sorting Photographs, Filtering Sources
After the fieldwork I had two tasks. The photographs, and the texts.
The Photographs
Several hundred. The first pass was mechanical. One folder per museum, one subfolder per gallery, one tag per object type. Bishop, British, Louvre. This is archiving. It does not generate an argument.
The second pass changed the logic. I stopped sorting by institution and started placing the same class of object from all three museums side by side. Three kiʻi in a row. Three label designs in a row. Three spatial arrangements in a row. That is when the differences stopped being invisible. Bishop's kiʻi stands on stone. The British Museum's stands on a red plinth under a spotlight. The Louvre's stands alone in an empty case. One class of object. Three grammars of display.
The argument came out of the photographs, not out of the theory. The editing rhythm was already deciding itself: not linear narrative, but comparative juxtaposition.
The Sources
I went back to the course readings, but now with a new set of questions. Stillman's concept of kuleana helped me name what the Bishop labels were doing when they printed Hawaiian scholars' voices directly onto the wall. Baker's distinction between commodity and sovereignty helped me read the British Museum's "returned on loan" wording, a sentence that grammatically acknowledges ownership while institutionally refusing to release it. Crawford's work on the tourist gaze helped me understand what was produced in the Louvre when strangers laughed at an object no one had given them the context to see.
Beyond the course readings I pulled the British Museum's exhibition catalogue, and I returned to the Illustrated London News and The Graphic from 1900, which carried images of objects looted from the Old Summer Palace during the Boxer Rebellion. I had started to realize that I would need a second comparative frame, between the Hawaiian colonial experience and the Chinese colonial experience, because that comparison was one of the few things I, as a student from mainland China, was actually positioned to offer. But I also knew that the moment this comparison entered the film it became a dangerous operation. I set it aside for Week Four.
The last materials to enter the archive were 1950s Hawaiian tourism films from the Internet Archive, Hawaii At Your Wingtip and Highway to Hawaii, and historical footage of Haunani-Kay Trask speaking in protest. These would later sit against the museum footage as a second voice.
By the end of the week the materials were sorted and the argument had a shape. The film itself had not yet been cut.
4.1
Editing as Thinking: An Unresolved Contradiction
Editing is not placing pre-formed ideas onto a timeline. Editing is thinking inside the timeline.
I assumed the core argument of this film was institutional critique. Three museums, three regimes of power, compared and done. The first rough cut held that position. It was coherent. It was also thin. It was correct but it had no moment that made me uncomfortable, and a film with no discomfort is a film that has not thought hard enough.
The discomfort arrived while I was re-watching the British Museum footage, specifically the bowl labeled "returned on loan." At first I wanted to use that object to demonstrate imperial hypocrisy, proof that the Museum could not even commit to full repatriation. Then a different question surfaced: if everything were returned, could Hawaiʻi's current infrastructure, conservation capacity, and political conditions protect these objects.
I know that question is politically uncomfortable. I deleted it from the voiceover several times and put it back.
What brought it back was the Old Summer Palace. Chinese people have been demanding the return of looted Yuanmingyuan objects for over a century, and I grew up as one of those people. But if I am honest with myself, across everything twentieth-century China went through, wars, revolutions, campaigns, the Cultural Revolution, it is not obvious that those objects would have survived at home. Repatriation is justice. But justice is not the same as safety. Safety is not the same as dignity. And dignity is the most fragile thing in this entire question.
This section is the most uncertain passage in the film. Some viewers will read it as an apologia for colonialism. It is not. But it is also not a clean decolonial argument. It is an unresolved contradiction, and I left it in the film because I could not cut it without lying to myself.
One other section took a long time to handle: the passage on "exchange," on Kamehameha's letter to King George III. My first version argued that much of Hawaiian cultural loss was not extracted but exchanged, that rulers handed over cultural material in pursuit of political recognition. Somewhere in the cut I realized that phrasing was itself the problem. To describe a sovereign's diplomatic act as an "exchange" is to accept the colonizer's cognitive frame. Kamehameha's gifts to George III were not a surrender of culture. They were diplomatic gifts between sovereigns under the international law of the period. The Hawaiian Kingdom was at the time a recognized sovereign state. What converted those diplomatic gifts into "cultural commodities" was colonial power itself.
So I changed the wording. The film no longer says that culture was "exchanged away." It says that the process by which colonial power reframed a sovereign's diplomacy as economic exchange was itself a form of epistemic violence. The revision is small. It is also the single most important edit I made.
The final cut runs sixteen minutes. I walked into three museums and photographed hundreds of objects, believing I was documenting artifacts. In the editing I discovered what I had actually documented: two forces fighting for the right to interpret the same set of objects.
And myself. A triple outsider holding a camera. Leaving a reflection on a vitrine. Neither guardian nor looter. Still learning how to look.
Final Film