So You Believed (So, You Believed)

Undergraduate Senior Thesis, 2022

So You Believed is a conceptual series of photographs taken and sequenced by Bonnie Deyang. It describes her experience of what it felt like to be a part of the evangelical Christian culture, as a Chinese-American, in the Bible Belt of the United States. This body of work poetically discusses the intersection of race, religion, and Southern culture using repeated images of (white) fences, rural landscapes, and wide angles as symbols to demonstrate the distance between them and what they were told to be a part of.

The question that remained for the artist at this intersection of race, religion, and her cultural upbringing was “are you in, or will you stay out?”