Sentient Beings
by Pok Chi Lau
The book brings together photographs and poems by the artist in a portrait of four generations of Cuban Chinese, made between 2009 and 2019. Moving across time and lineage, the work attends to the subtle continuities and disjunctions that shape diasporic identity. Many of the sitters are of mixed heritage and no longer speak Chinese fluently, yet a sense of ancestral presence persists—carried in memory, gesture, and feeling.
Through these portraits, the project reflects on inheritance beyond language, where cultural belonging is not solely defined by fluency or tradition, but by quieter forms of attachment. The images and texts evoke a lived connection to ancestry that endures in intimate, often unspoken ways, offering a nuanced meditation on identity, loss, and continuity across generations.
Edition of 200
Publisher: b minor
ISBN: 978-1-950615-13-1 Design: Matthew Austin Production: For The Birds Trapped In Airports, Los Angeles, California
Dimension: W 24.3cm X W16.8cm X D 1.9cm
