Open in Emergency 2nd Edition
A hybrid book art project that decolonizes mental health.
AALR’s most ambitious project yet, Open in Emergency is an arts and humanities intervention to decolonize mental health, a community effort, led by guest-editor Mimi Khúc, to collectively ask what Asian American unwellness looks like and how to tend to that unwellness. This special issue provided a space for artists, scholars, organizers, and community to explore structures of care that we have already been building – and to dream into being new structures, new tools, to better care for our collective needs.
Rather than trying to recalibrate our existing mental health resources to better engage race and Asian American experience, we decided to start on the opposite end, with what wellness, unwellness, and care actually look like in Asian American life. With the help of an amazing group of writers and artists, scholars and teachers, practitioners and survivors, we created a work of book art that decolonizes mental health and opens up a wealth of new approaches, made possible by two wildly successful Kickstarter campaigns, in 2016 and 2019.
Guest-edited by Mimi Khúc, with guest curation by Eliza Noh, erin Khuê Ninh, Tamara Ho, and Long Bui, this special issue works to reimagine what counts as unwellness and wellness in our communities through a dynamic mix of writing, visual art, and interactive mini-projects.
What’s Inside?
a hacked mock DSM II: Asian American Edition — a catalog of community-generated “definitions”/reflections, with alternate understandings of un/wellness and critiques of Psychology as field, discourse, and industry.
a deck of Asian American tarot cards — featuring original art and text that work to reveal the hidden contours of our Asian American emotional, psychic, and spiritual lives.
Included with purchase are digital versions of the following materials from the original OiE:
a foldout poster — a collectively woven tapestry of written and visual testimonials, a process-oriented art piece that reimagines community care & healing.
a pamphlet on postpartum depression — a redaction/erasure/annotation of existing postpartum depression info-literature that centers lived mother of color experience.
a stack of daughter-to-mother letters — handwritten letters that rethink intergenerational intimacies and violences, Asian American daughterhood and motherhood.