When Minneapolis photographer Wing Huie and his ceramicist wife, Tara, set off in her new neon-green Volkswagen bug in August 2001, they had no fixed agenda. They planned to spend up to a year on the road, following their whims, seeing the country, maybe taking some pictures on the way. Or maybe not.

Nine months and 39 states later, they returned with more than 7,000 photos and 40 hours of videotaped interviews with dozens of people from Washington, D.C., to Sand Point, Idaho, and Honolulu. They've distilled that vast sea of words, photos and moving images clips of Elvis impersonators, law professors and railroad workers; photos of landscapes, streetscapes and sky into an exhibition opening Friday in the freshly renovated and relocated galleries of the Minnesota Museum of American Art in downtown St. Paul.

Called "9 Months in America: An Ethnocentric Tour," the show promises a distinctly Asian-American perspective on the country. The opening-night party, too, will be an extravaganza of Asian-flavored music and performances ranging from traditional tunes performed on a pipa, a Chinese string instrument, to alternative pop by "Watching Leona," a young Hmong band, and readings by writers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian heritage. The headliners flying in from Texas are award-winning Elvis impersonator John Newinn and his father Henry Newinn, a one-time Vietnamese refugee who is founding president of the Houston-based Asian Worldwide Elvis Fan Club.

"It's about America, but in this America, Asians are the majority," said Wing Huie, a Duluth native of Chinese heritage. "A lot of it is Asian-centric, but it's not exclusively that."

The show includes 105 photos in color and black-and-white, all taken by Wing, and three videos of roughly 60 minutes each that will run continuously in the galleries. The videos are a collaboration between Wing, who did most of the interviewing, and Tara, the primary camera-handler. Mark K. Tang, a Hong Kong-born, American-educated filmmaker now based in Minneapolis, helped edit and produce the videos, which are montages of encounters with mostly Asian-Americans across the country.

"This trip was a personal exploration for me," Wing said recently during a break at Tang's studio in south Minneapolis, where he and the filmmaker were putting the finishing touches on a rough cut of the videos.

Tara was in France "painting a castle," he explained. That is, she was helping her sister, a decorative painter who specializes in faux finishes, rehab a small derelict castle that Twin Cities friends are converting into a bed-and-breakfast outside of Paris. She'll be back in time for the opening shindig Friday, he added.

The stereotypical view of Asians in the United States assumes they live primarily in urban areas like San Francisco's Chinatown or Los Angeles' Japantown, he said. Huie was more interested in the experiences of his compatriots in such small towns as Sand Point, where they met Connie Shan, a Chinese-American waitress, who laughingly describes herself on video as "an Okie from Muskogee" who polished her English by singing Connie Francis ballads. Frank Wu, a Washington, D. C., law professor and author of "Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White," jokes about being a "professional Chinese" who spends his time explaining his people to whites.

The most touching and incongruous story is that of Henry Newinn, who has transformed his Houston home into a shrine of Elvis memorabilia. He tells of hearing Elvis' music as a child growing up in Vietnam where American soldiers played it. Later as a refugee in the United States, he was inspired by the story of the poor, under-educated Mississippi boy whose talent made him a wealthy pop star. "Always our morale was poor, low self-esteem," Newinn said of his refugee years. "But we look at Elvis and . . . If he can do it, why not us?"

"9 Months" is in some ways a natural extension of Huie's earlier photographic projects. In 2000, he finished "Lake Street USA," a four-year effort to photograph the ethnic, racial and economic diversity to be found on that Minneapolis street. Earlier he had photographed residents of St. Paul's ethnically mixed Frogtown neighborhood. Both projects resulted in books. The University of Minnesota Press, which issued "Frogtown" in 1996, also plans to publish "9 Months in America." The "9 Months" trip was made possible by a $33,000 Leadership Initiative in Neighborhoods grant from the St. Paul Companies and a $5,000 travel grant from the Jerome Foundation.

"I've always been conscious in my work, and especially in this work, that I'm collecting points of view," Huie said, adding that he tried to let people tell their own stories without interpreting or criticizing them.

"We're not making a political documentary," Tang said.

"It's not about the way things should be, but about the way things are," Huie said. "How do we deal with this multicultural, post-globalism era where people are either too sensitive or too insensitive, depending on your point of view? By and large, our points of view are ethnocentric, but even that is just my point of view."

If You Go

9 Months in America

What: New show of 105 photos by Minneapolis artist Wing Young Huie plus three videos Huie and his wife, Tara, made on a nine-month road tour of 39 states.

When: Sat.-Aug. 1.

Party: 8 p.m.-1 a.m. Friday. $10 advance, $12 at door.

Where: Minnesota Museum of American Art, 50 W. Kellogg Blvd. at Market St., St. Paul. 651-292-4355