As the final installment of my three-part series about Asian American Hollywood actors and actresses, I wanted to focus on a woman not as well known as Anna May Wong or Sessue Hayakawa: Kieu Chinh, a Vietnamese American woman who most commonly acted in Vietnam War films. Featured in films such as Operation: CIA (1965) and A Yank in Viet-nam (1964), she later stated in an interview with the New York Times that “I’d like to see more stories based on the Vietnamese people, on our culture, so the audience will see more of the civilian side of life instead of just barbed wire, blood and bombing”. More recently, she starred as Suyuan in The Joy Luck Club (1993) and Journey from the Fall (2005), a film that follows a Vietnamese family through the re-education camps, boat people experience, and being refugees in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. Since the start of her career, she’s received numerous awards, including an Emmy Award and multiple lifetime achievement awards. 

For the past few weeks, I’ve spent several late nights in the Digital Print Lab at Stamps watching the inkjet printers spit out pretty pieces of paper at an agonizingly slow pace. Why is that? Well, I’m planning on selling prints of my artwork at Con Ja Nai, which is the one-day anime convention held at UMich in the Modern Languages Building on April 9th this year. There’s many freelance illustrators who make a living off of selling their artwork at craft fairs or conventions, but for now I’m just selling my art as a fun side gig.

Anyway, I printed my favorite pieces onto 8.5 x 11″ and 11 x 17″ pieces of Epson Enhanced Matte Paper or Epson Luster Photo Paper so that they’ll look great hanging on someone’s wall someday.

However, the prints came out of the printer with white borders around them, so I had to trim the white borders off with a paper cutter. Some of my designs were also more suitable to smaller print sizes, so I printed multiple on a single sheet of paper and then cut them down to size by hand.

After being cut down to size, I’m currently storing them in a plastic bin that doubles as a display rack.

I package every print in a resealable clear plastic bag that also has one of my business cards in it. This protects the print from dust and damage while also letting the customer and passerby look at the art they just purchased. Also, I’ve had a few bad experiences with purchasing art at conventions and not receiving it in a plastic sleeve, so the nice art gets dented and damaged before I can put it on my wall, so I want to avoid doing that to anyone else. 🙁

I’m looking forward to meeting other artists and nerds at Con Ja Nai next month! Perhaps one of my future posts will go into how I design and order factory-produced merchandise that rounds out the rest of my sales stock, or perhaps I will go back to posting about my artistic process… Stay tuned!