Past, Present & Future XI: 2025-26 FF FUND Recipients Celebration

Artist Website: https://melwatkin.com/

Project Description

Index of Pressure traces latent fingerprints on American prisons’ banned books to reveal how censorship traverses bodies and institutions. This project focuses on books by women of color, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and erotic romance novels by Zane, prohibited not for sexually-liberal content alone but due to racial and sexual biases of prison censors. When these books are intercepted, only the sender and censor touch them, rendering them legally and physically untouchable for the incarcerated reader. Reading is interrupted before it can occur, leaving disrupted communication.

As a queer Asian woman, my body has long existed outside the American legal imagination; Asian migration was structured around male labor while women were excluded, and queer Asians were banned from entering the US until 1987. This history informs my examination of erasure, refusal, and the question: if speech is denied, can the fingertip still leave a record?

Using forensic methods, including ninhydrin reactions, fingerprint powders, and digital scanning, I will lift amino acid, sweat, and oil residues left by fingertips that handled these banned books, visualizing them as both data and poetic index. These traces will be printed using risograph and offset methods to produce a 100-copy artist’s edition book combining fingerprint images, rejection letters, and maps of facilities where these books were banned. Drawing from the Indigenous philosophy, “stones remember,” I approach each printed page as a surface holding memory through contact. Index of Pressure transforms touch into archival transmission, exposing how censorship marks flesh, knowledge, and desire.

Biography

Sue Jeong Ka is a visual artist whose practice challenges systems of censorship, surveillance, and institutional control. Working with banned materials, redacted archives, and bodily data, she examines how institutions shape visibility along lines of race, sexuality, and legal precarity. Her projects often unfold in public contexts, using data to question how individuals are made legible, exposed, or erased within larger systems. Through installation, performance, and research-based media, she interrogates how knowledge is produced, who is rendered visible, and what is left out. For Ka, art becomes a method of remembrance, recovering the voices and presences of those pushed to the margins.

Ka is an alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and Hunter College. She has held residencies and fellowships with the Drawing Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Artists Alliance Inc., the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Queens Museum, The Laundromat Project, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. She is developing a public art project examining how carceral censorship and the redlining of information access operate in California, with implications extending across the US, in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library, UCLA, and NYC Books Through Bars.