Help Oliver Finish His Undergraduate Degree

Yuan Oliver Jin is an undergraduate student (senior, graduating in May 2022) at Sarah Lawrence College. His area of focus is photography, and he has been a contributing and present member of the college’s visual arts community. In 2021, in support and recognition of his work, Oliver received the Lori Hertzberg Prize for Creativity, and the Meredith Fonda Russell fieldwork grant, for a project about the legacy of uranium mining in the American Southwest.

Severe and unexpected financial emergencies meant that Oliver and his family are unable to afford his final year at the college. If he is not allowed to continue, Oliver will be forced to leave the United States, a country he considers home. The situation with his family back in China will not simply improve with time, and Oliver has no choice but to seek urgent assistance through crowdfunding. In order for Oliver to finish his undergraduate degree, $39,815 is needed by the end of the year. He once again looks to his community to come to his aid and support.

 

You can see his selected work here: yuanoliverjin.com

 

Personal Statement:

 

I grew up in Beijing, and I am a Chinese national. When I was fourteen years old, I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah to attend high school. Over the course of my four years of high school, moving from host family to host family, Utah became my home. America became my home even though my belonging was so tenuous and invisible in legal terms. My work investigated America, its history, its possibilities and failures, both from the perspective of a foreigner and from the perspective of someone who calls it home.

 

During the pandemic, as violence against Asians and Asian Americans flared across the United States, I began to embark on a series of long road trips across the continental United States while enrolling in Sarah Lawrence College remotely. The work coalesced around the histories of Chinese migrant laborers in the United States in the mid to late 19th century. Through my travels and research from the dense forests of the Rocky Mountains to the freezing peaks of the High Sierras to the luscious banks of the Mississippi River, a different American landscape, one that is filled with erased stories of Chinese migrant laborers, began to emerge in both my photography and writing. I saw myself in these sojourners who traversed and inhabited these landscapes more than a century ago, and grateful to be the custodian, I felt a deep urgency to tell their stories, to allow their ghostly presence to resurface in the landscape. The work is everything an artist could have asked for: it’s deeply personal, it’s timely, it’s urgent.

 

Severe family financial emergencies over the past year, compounded by the global pandemic, have made it impossible for me to afford my Sarah Lawrence education, and not being an American citizen, I do not qualify for most aid. In September 2021, Sarah Lawrence College wouldn’t allow me to enroll for my final year at the college due to the outstanding balances. It was so deeply painful and revealing that they would rather force me out of the country than to help me in a time of crisis. I know that I am not alone. Many students have had similarly painful experiences in times of crisis. The college recommended a leave of absence, but for me, a Chinese national, a leave of absence would force me to leave this country which I call home and put a stop in my work about important and missing chapters in the migration and labor history of this country.

 

I was eventually allowed to enroll in my final year at the college thanks to the outspoken support of the college’s faculty and student body as well as the generosity of two donors contributing $30,000 which covered a significant portion of my tuition. My status in the college and the country continues to be tenuous, and while the insecurities have been tempered, they are very much still present and felt everyday.

 

An additional $39,815 is needed by the end of the year in order for me to finish my undergraduate degree. An undergraduate degree will not only allow me to take the next step in my path to emigration, I will also use the valuable time between now and my graduation to keep producing my photo/text work about early Chinese immigrants to the United States.