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Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary
... Feminist art criticism and art has highlighted this use of women's bodies in relation to the formation of representations of racial, national and ethnic identities around the world, challenging colonial and Imperial histories and memorializing forms of nationalisms, where women's bodies are frequently used to stand for the nation. A critique of the links between woman, home and nation have been at the centre of assessments of women artists' work, especially in post-colonial writing about globalisation and diaspora or under former Socialist and authoritarian regimes (Shohat 1998;Datuin 2002;Machida 2008;Grzinic and Taflik 2014). This work has mounted an extensive critique of tokenism and identity politics on the question of being represented and being seen as "representative". ...
This essay is in four parts. The first offers a critique of James Elkins and Michael Newman’s book The State of Art Criticism (Routledge, 2008) for what it tells us about art criticism in academia and journalism and feminism; the second considers how a gendered analysis measures the “state” of art and art criticism as a feminist intervention; and the third, how neo-liberal mis-readings of Linda Nochlin and Laura Mulvey in the art world represent feminism in ideas about “greatness” and the “gaze”, whilst avoiding feminist arguments about women artists or their work, particularly on “motherhood”. In the fourth part, against the limits of the first three, the state of feminist art criticism across the last fifty years is reconsidered by highlighting the plurality of feminisms in transnational, transgenerational and progressive alliances.
... Japanese and Japanese American artists, designers, and musicians have been the subjects of a number of recent case studies (Park, 2005;Yoshimoto, 2005;Condry, 2006;Yoshihara, 2007;Hayashi, 2008;Machida, 2008); however, only a few of these studies deal with the issue of identity of young Japanese designers and artists today. Instead, I look at similar case studies, which investigate the older generation of Japanese fashion designers, such as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, Issei Miyake (Skov, 1996;Kondo, 1997;Kawamura, 2004), and young Asian American artists (Takezawa, 2011). ...
The present study explores the identity politics of young Japanese designers and artists working across national boundaries today. It addresses the following research questions: (i) Do young designers and artists aim to produce works with “universal” appeal or strategically make use of “Japaneseness”? (ii) Do they develop new transnational identities or regard themselves as “Japanese”? and (iii) Who do they think has the power to label their works as “Japanese” in the art worlds? For this purpose, I conducted in-depth interviews with professional designers and artists who have migrated from Japan to London, New York, or Paris. The results show that most designers and artists who were interviewed indeed aim to produce works with “universal” appeal, while only a few respondents attempt to strategically express “Japaneseness” in their works. However, regardless of whether they make use of “Japaneseness” or not, all respondents regard themselves as “Japanese” without developing new transnational identities. Even so, they do not search for or hold onto Japaneseness; but rather the media, as well as a certain part of the art world, persistently attempt to emphasize “Japaneseness,” due to the structure of the art world, where whiteness continues to be the “norm.” While designers and artists are increasingly oriented toward creating works with new forms and values through the transnational production system, gatekeepers and legitimators of the art world continue to fabricate “the nation” and reinforce boundaries of national culture.
This paper addresses how Bahc Yiso attained establishment in Korea through vocational labour and flexible authorial practice of his prior incarnation ‘Mo Bahc’ in New York. In relation to the post-1989 contemporary shift from New York to the global artworld and the notion of the networked artworker, it shows how Bahc authorially negotiated this terrain to significantly mediate in the formation of the Seoul artworld. It confirms the influence of the late-capitalist network in shaping the global contemporary artworld, but also demonstrates how the expansion of this field facilitated artworkers who desired to locate themselves beyond the Western institutional and intellectual frameworks of production. In conclusion, it asserts that to account for the progressive practice of a contemporary artworker one should critically attend to the entirety of their labour and agency in the network; beyond and including the production of art works.
While research about contemporary Asian arts exhibited in mega museums has attracted growing attention, there is little dialogue concerning community-based art practices in everyday Asian and Asian American neighborhoods. This interview article highlights community-based art projects led by a grassroots organization, the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (CCC), to help understand Chinatown’s stories as shared and lived by the community during a challenging time. Hoi Leung, CCC’s chief curator, explained how the organization mobilized art to share diverse local stories, celebrate a sense of belonging, and raise public awareness about racial justice issues within the communities it serves. To counter socially constructed assumptions about Chinatown and its residents, CCC actively develops cross-sector partnerships to centralize underrepresented voices through community-based arts and projects.
In 1998 John Roberts argued that the recent ‘history of photography in Britain… is a history of dispersed and embattled counterhegemonic practices breaking out of the ideological confines of Modernism’. However, the contributions of Britain’s Black and Asian photographers to this challenge has yet to be fully recognised. This paper will address the recent work of Mohini Chandra and Allan deSouza: artists of South Asian origin, whose work engages the potentialities of Conceptual photography to pose questions about the place of the migrant in relation to transnational borders - while simultaneously testing the limits of what might be identified as ‘British Art’.
Throughout his career Allan deSouza has investigated the politics of location and the subjective experience of migration. His photographs of airport lounges, corridors, trainstations and runways present, what Marc Augé and others have described as, postmodern non-spaces. By taking the position of a migrant provocateur, deSouza’s works show these sites of mobility as inherently restrictive, and often prohibitive, for nonconforming bodies. Relatedly, issues of journeying and belonging, and how they might be articulated through the photographic object have been prescient concerns for Chandra. In her film and photographic works, that utilise and reflect upon her father’s personal archive, migration is presented from the space of transit: from the interior space of the aeroplane it is shown as both embodied experience and psychological state. In the work of both artists, the figure of the unsettled South Asian diaspora takes centre stage to remind us that migration is neither uniformly nor equally experienced.
The chapter sketches the contexts in which Asianness, gender and visual art interact in contemporary US culture. Focusing on issues of circulation of contemporary art and the related politic discourse, the chapter outlines the ways in which Chinese art and Asian America connect today in the USA, with the new interest in China overshadowing the history of Asian American communities and their diasporic art. The author offers a postcolonial critique of how this cultural dynamic renders invisible the contributions of Asian women artists living in California.
This dissertation examines a selection of Asian American experimental poetries from the 1960’s to the present day through the sensory paradigms of avant-garde aesthetic discourse. By approaching both the poem and racial formation in sonic terms, this dissertation project argues that rethinking the sensory as well as the political ramifications of sounding can help us recuperate Asian American poets’ often overlooked experimentation with poetic form. Specifically, I read the works of Marilyn Chin, Theresa Cha, John Yau, Cathy Park Hong, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Tan Lin. By tracing the historical conditions of Orientalist objectification and re-interrogating postmodern theories of sight, sound, and the body, I seek to show how these poets’ invocation of sonic paradigms reworks those theories and to broaden our critical vocabulary for writing about sound in poetry.
Compared with other ‘peripheral' art, exhibitions of Asian art in the United States remain depoliticized and unscrutinized. This essay examines recent exhibitions against the long trajectory of collecting, classifying and displaying Asian art in the US, and argues that, despite their efforts to venture beyond conventional museology, art institutions today still tend to prioritize poetics over politics, ‘tradition' over modernity, homogeneity over heterogeneity. Such lingering Orientalism can be attributed to reasons ranging from logistical difficulties to conflicted interests, but above all to a lack of historicity: the intentional or habitual shunning of contextual complexities, the inclusion of which may deprive the artworks – and their hosts – of their pretense to neutrality, transcendence and aura. The critical approaches taken by contemporary Asian American artists and curators, on the other hand, are also fraught with contradictions and ambivalence, but they point to more historicized, nuanced and illuminating ways to display Asian art. Contemplating the unexplored directions and hidden connotations of Asian and Asian American art exhibitions in recent years, this essay contends that restoring and explicating historical specificity is crucial for building and propagating meaningful accounts of world art history, in which issues such as the appropriation of as well as resistance to modernity, the migration of objects, personae and techniques, and the experiences of the global diaspora can serve as governing themes and guiding principles, replacing a taxonomy based on nationality, ‘culture' or chronology. Those accounts of world art history are destined to be fragmentary, yet only through such stories can we envision substantive (if ephemeral) connectivity.
This paper attempts to look at the contemporary global condition of Filipino art production by using the term “aestheticscapes”1 as a critical category of analysis. The confluence of the terms “aesthetics” and “-scapes” allows us to stretch the language of aesthetic production in a global scale of interactions, exchanges, contacts, circulations, negotiations, and amalgamations of geo and ethnoaesthetic positions. Significantly, “aestheticscapes” magnify the conditions of epistemic relations between global powers and discourses of the agencies of the artists via history, geography, aesthetic epistemes, and other social narratives. By looking at the installation artworks of selected Filipino diasporic, migrant, and mobile artists; this paper proposes that the conditions of global openness and mobility of ideas and people produce possibilities of reimagining and reworlding art history and art theory using the narrative of diasporic, migrant and mobile lives of artists and their works. This paper also suggests that aestheticscapes construct a platform of epistemic inquiry that fleshes out the different perspectival situatedness and conditions of aesthetic positions in global artworld and world art (studies).
This paper looks three visual artists—Scott Tsuchitani, Hasan Elahi, and Gaye Chan—whose work uses online platforms, public interventions, socially engaged art practice, and other anti-commodity strategies to subvert and resist oppressive economic, political, and social systems. Their work is intrinsically tied to themes of identity and self-determination, linking corporate, military, governmental, and colonial control with issues of sovereignty and anti-imperialism. These artists’ produce open-source artwork that is often meant to be freely shared and given away without expectation of monetary gain or reward. Some are immigrants, some are second- or third-generation U.S. born, but all look at the integration of cultural practice and anticapitalist critique. By interrogating capital-based systems of exchange and by resisting commodification, classification, and control, these Asian American artists are using their creative practice to actively oppose the regulation of identity, autonomy, and culture.
Scott Tsuchitani’s online and in situ interventions including Memoirs of a Sansei Geisha and Lord, It’s The Samurai critique representations and assumptions about Japanese and Asian culture within the museum system. Hasan Elahi’s online self-surveillance project Tracking Transience attempts to defeat the capitalist model of the scarcity value of items and information by continually placing minute details of Elahi’s everyday life on the Internet for all to access. Gaye Chan’s project Eating In Public, utilizes guerilla plantings, seed sharing, and free goods exchanges in order to explore issues of land use and retaking the commons from both private and public interests.
Filipino American cultural critic Sarita See notes, “Identity is a decolonizing practice, one that ironically comes most alive when identity is under erasure.” Syjuco’s and Elahi’s freely accessible information flows, Tsuchitani’s interventions, and Chan’s land use projects are a means of asserting Asian/American identity through direct challenges to the commodity-based global market economy. By integrating creative practice with social activism and by critiquing the political, economic, and governmental systems that increasingly bind and restrict us, these artists use their work as tools for social change and as a means of actively resisting oppressive or outdated systems of exchange.
Connections to workshop theme
Though all four artists are based in the United States, their work reflects transnationalist flows. Hassan Elahi was born in Bangladesh and his work examines the experiences of a South Asian man in the post-9/ll era. Scott Tsuchitani is a third-generation Japanese American who looks in part at the conflation of Japanese and Japanese American identity and issues of authorship and authority. Gaye Chan is a Chinese American living in Hawai’i who examines the concerns of Native Hawai’ans and their struggle for sovereignty and independence from U.S. colonial and governmental rule. Stephanie Syjuco is a Filipino American whose work in part deals with relationships between black-market goods from the Philippines and their place in the global capitalist economy, as well as the misrepresentation and exoticization of Asian cultures in the museum system. Online platforms are intrinsic to the creation and dissemination of all of their work, thus utilizing a borderless, interconnected virtuality that more easily evades geographic and national boundaries. In these ways this presentation examines the workshop’s themes of “trans-regional processes, structures, practices, and flows within and across the territorial and imaginative space of Asia.”
I examine the art labour of three Japanese women butoh artists living and working internationally. They are foreign at home and abroad: when these artists return to Japan, they are erased from the current arts scene or they are cast as outsiders in a separate category from ‘Japanese artists’; they are also compelled to keep their butoh designation in foreign places because it lends an exotic, economically viable Japanese-ness to their art labour. The artists complicate any simple outsider/resident status or national/cultural representation. They also take on an in-transit-ness, in which they are always on the move and always ‘at work’. I argue that their art-labour-under-duress amplifies their physical intensity, arising from interrelated pressures such as economic conditions and relationships with butoh and Japanese art labour practices. This art labour intensity sustains creativity and initiates a ‘stranger community’ that is a vital part of their radical art labour and survival.
