Fresh Talk Daring Gazes Conversations on Asian American Art Pdf

Asian American Art, Pasts and Futures

Guest Editors

Contributors*

Serena Qiu, "In the Presence of Archival Fugitives: Chinese Women, Souvenir Images, and the 1893 Chicago Earth's Fair"
Yinshi Lerman-Tan, "Sadakichi Hartmann's American Art: Citizenship, Asian America, and Disquisitional Resistance"
Karen Fang, "Commercial Pattern and Midcentury Asian American Fine art: The Greeting Cards of Tyrus Wong"
Catherine Damman, "Fine art, Engineering science, Crisis: The Piece of work of Carl Cheng"
Sadia Shirazi, "Returning to Dialectics of Isolation: The Non-Aligned Movement, Imperial Feminism, and a Third Way"
Eunyoung Park, "Beyond Conflict, Toward Collaboration: The Korean American Arts Community in New York, 1980s–1990s"
Jenni Sorkin, "Time Goes By, Then Slowly: Tina Takemoto's Queer Futurity"
Ellen Tani, "Un-Disciplining the Archive: Jerome Reyes and Maia Cruz Palileo"
Hsuan Hsu, "Beatrice Glow and the Botanical Intimacies of Empire"

Decision

Aleesa Alexander, "Asian American Art and the Obligation of Museums"

Introduction

by Marci Kwon

Scholars of Asian American studies and American art know this prototype. Andrew Russell'south Meeting of the Rails, Promontory, Utah (fig. 1) commemorates the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Tiptop, Utah, on May 10, 1869. The photo is as dense with white male bodies equally any American history painting, and this is surely the indicate. 2 men hang off the hulking locomotives, reaching across the leached heaven in a vain attempt to crown the moment with a toast. The gap between canteen and flute is bridged by the handshake of the men in the foreground. Their squeeze clinches the illusion of e meeting westward,¹ as Russell would later retitle the photograph.² This press of flesh is transformed into the vanishing point by the orthogonal lines formed by the workers, diagonals that cleave the conventions of spatial representation from ground and heaven, an "optical armature," as Jennifer Roberts described it, naturalizing their possession of this space, this land.^three

Fig. 1. Andrew J. Russell, East and W Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail, 1869. Collodion glass negative, 10 x 13 in. Oakland Museum of California

Within Asian American studies, Russell's photo has been taken as an allegory of invisibility. The film has been discussed for its dearth of Chinese railroad workers, who made up 90 percent of the labor force of the Cardinal Pacific Railroad.⁴ Approximately twenty thou Chinese workers laid hundreds of miles of track, blasted through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and in 1867, struck for improved working conditions and equal pay with their white counterparts.⁵ The fruits of their labor are consolidated in the famed last spike (fig. 2), also known as the golden spike, which ceremonially united the two tracks congenital by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads into a single unbroken line. Matrimony Pacific vice president Sam Durant and Cardinal Pacific Railroad president Leland Stanford were charged with borer the golden boom into place with a silverish maul. At the decisive moment, nevertheless, their blow missed.⁶ Despite this failure, spike and maul were quickly whisked away and replaced with an ordinary woods rails, secured into identify with ordinary iron nails. "The Chinese actually laid the last tie and drove the last fasten," wrote a journalist who witnessed the scene.^vii

Fig. 2. William T. Garrett Foundry, The Last Spike, 1869. Gilt, assimilated with copper, 7/16 x v 9/16 x i/2 in. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Gift of David Hewes, 1998.115

Today the golden spike and silver maul reside at the institution built by Leland Stanford's fortune, a fortune that was itself largely created from Chinese labor.⁸ Like a relic of the true cross, the gilt fasten was both witness and active participant in this formative moment of American empire—a moment that is oftentimes taken as a triumphant example of American ingenuity, rather than a driver of settler colonialism and genocide. In the words of historian Manu Karuka, the golden fasten "symbolically finalized the industrial infrastructure of a continental empire where none had existed earlier."⁹ Created from $350 worth of gold by the William T. Garrett Foundry of San Francisco, information technology is engraved with the dates of the groundbreaking and completion of the railroad, along with the names of railroad officers and directors.¹⁰ Like many objects of celebration, it remembers sure things past forgetting others. Information technology alchemizes violence into golden, labor into capital, and history into object, consolidating the unquantifiable into a single treasure that can be weighed, valued, and collected.

Even so, the golden fasten likewise remembers in ways that contradict the intention of its makers. Its gleaming surface symbolizes monetary value, yeah, merely it besides reflects the environment and the faces of the people who encounter it. Like Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial, to stand before the spike is to see the names of others scarring your face. To expect is to exist implicated. And backside these scars of proper names are those who are not named: the thousands of Chinese workers who built the railroad, and the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian people killed in the Vietnam State of war. They are at once nowadays and absent-minded backside the names gouged into gold and granite. They are ghosts.

Russell'southward photo besides holds a ghost. Although in that location are several spectral blurs among the crowd, only the effigy at eye left shows his back. Based on the pose and clothing, historian Gordon Chang has recently suggested that the figure might be that which many Asian Americans have longed for: a Chinese worker.¹¹ It is impossible, still, to know for certain.

Hovering between invisibility and presence, identity and obscurity, this figure embodies the complexities of placing Asian American artists within art history. Similar them, he is both in plainly sight and impossible to see. To call him Asian American, or to claim his significance for Asian American history, at in one case sharpens the blur of his body, making him more visible, and saddles him with a label that would accept puzzled him. In his ghostly unknowability, he embodies what has been described as the "fundamental paradox" of minoritarian discourse: "that 'identity' is the very ground upon which both progress and bigotry are made."¹²

How tin nosotros laurels the unknowable effigy in Russell's photograph? What does information technology mean to claim him as Chinese, and name him as Asian American? How do we write about him without consigning him to the farthermost poles of oblivion or perfect visibility? What can he teach united states of america, and how does our desire for what he can teach united states of america constrain him? Are his shoulders non stooped enough already? What did he exercise before this motion picture was taken, and what did he do after? What would information technology mean to queer him? How can we come across the women who are nowhere in this picture, and honor their specific burdens and joys? Who loved him, and whom did he love? What did he dream virtually?

⸹

This In the Circular was start conceived earlier the COVID-19 pandemic, during the final year of the Trump Administration. Its call for papers went out during quarantine, amid a rise in xenophobic rhetoric and anti-Asian hate, and in the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd (the latter abetted by Hmong American police officer Tou Thao) and the subsequent uprising against police force brutality and anti-Blackness. Our deadline for first drafts was weeks after white supremacists stormed the United states Capitol Building. And soon after we returned these drafts to our authors, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Before long Chung Park, Hyun Jung Kim, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue were murdered in Atlanta past a gunman motivated past racist, misogynist detest. Information technology is a bitter thing to know that these events will lead some to call the topic of Asian American art relevant or important, equally if this epidemic of violence was at all a new phenomenon; as if a racialized subject is just worthy of regard in relation to white supremacy.

My coeditor and I are employed by Stanford Academy, an establishment built by the wealth of the transcontinental railroad. It is also built on unceded Muwekma Ohlone land, in function by Chinese laborers who, as contempo archeological work has uncovered, planted the palm trees that line Palm Bulldoze, the main artery of campus.^thirteen Every day that I walk across these grounds, I am reminded that Asian American history is not but the history of Asian Americans, but the history of race, capitalism, labor, settler colonialism, imperialism, legal exclusion, incarceration, gendered violence, and war—and their entanglement—in American history. These are abstract words and concepts whose precise meanings do not remain stable only are contingent upon their specific historical moment. They too proper noun structures that exert undeniable power, in both past and nowadays; in both elsewhere and hither; where I piece of work and alive; in what I read, encounter, and study; in the body I inhabit; and in the bodies of all racialized subjects.

The 9 essays that comprise this In the Round department address a range of topics, including the display of Chinese American women at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; Hallmark greeting menu pattern; modernity's racialization of labor; and the entwinement of olfactory property and colonialism. Together, they show Asian American art as polyvocal rather than monolithic, encompassing a range of ethnicities and experiences, and intersecting with gender, sexuality, and class. What unites the essays is an attentiveness to the myriad ways Asian Americans have engaged with a range of overlapping power structures that seek to control and determine their existence. In this, many of the authors find lessons in Asian American studies, whose detailed investigations of these structures and longstanding emphasis on transnational perspectives offering of import lessons for historians of American art. As Lisa Lowe has shown, to believe in the liberal humanist ideals at the center of Western modernity, the US nation-state included, requires a willful forgetting of the unfreedom at their core: the entwined histories of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and indentureship. Race is a "trace of liberal forgetting."¹⁴ Race is all that which the myth of America attempts to repress. Race is my reflection in the spike's gold gleam, and the names that float across my peel.¹⁵

Asian American fine art helps us see these things. It is more a superficial addition to the history of American art, a single week on a syllabus or a single painting on a wall, a bauble to brand old narratives announced more various. Rather, Asian American art allows one to grab sight of their own reflection in the gilded spike, and to wonder how this delusion was created, whom it has obliterated, and how it may be destroyed. The report of Asian American art is crucial to critically examining what is meant, and who is being addressed, by terms such as American fine art, American, art, and art history.

At the same time, as Anne Anlin Cheng pointed out more than twenty years ago, in the U.s.a. a person of color is seen as worthy of attention only when they have suffered visible harm.¹⁶ Studying the work of Asian American artists is mayhap one way to sidestep this obsession with injury. To think and experience with Asian American artists requires one to fiercely baby-sit the knowledge that they and their work are more than illustrations of pernicious structures, or even tools to dismantle them.¹⁷ Although they may be both, they provide other things also. They offer a perspective on that which often remains submerged within more abstruse scholarly accounts: the multiple and complex ways Asian Americans accept lived, worked, created, and imagined in relation to a world that seeks ever more stray ways to homogenize and dehumanize them. Their work offers the blink of not but what we take been fighting, but what we are fighting for.

Asian American Art: A Brief Historiography

Artists and makers of Asian descent take been working in the United States since their arrival on its shores.¹⁸ They ran photography studios; created and participated in arts organizations; showed in major exhibitions such as Whitney annuals; and illustrated the covers of popular magazines such as Time and Life. Inquiry for the survey text Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 has identified more than 1 thousand artists of Asian descent working in California alone during its chronological span.¹⁹ The number is staggering, indicating the deep significance of fine art and art making for Asian Americans just too the book of work that remains to exist studied, and probable has been lost.

As Gordon Chang has noted, early critics and art historians "never could quite understand how to label or characterize their piece of work: Were the artists Americans, Asians, or another sort of beast? Was their artwork American, Japanese, Chinese, or something else? Oriental? Eastern?"²⁰ Chang suggests the congruence between aesthetic classification and the racialization of Asian Americans in the early twentieth century. The involvement in designating a piece of work as east or due west, Chinese or American, betrays an obsession with national origins that parallels the exclusionary logic of contemporaneous clearing policies, and moreover assumes that these categories can be easily separated. To this betoken, artistic techniques originating in Asia were frequently designated as ancient by U.s.a. critics, echoing the Orientalist association of Asia as belated in relation to a mod West.²¹

These issues of classification irrevocably shifted with the social foment of the 1960s. In 1968, University of California Berkeley graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka coined the term "Asian American" to replace the racist and colonialist designation "oriental" and unite the various Asian ethnic groups participating in the radical Tertiary World Liberation Front (TWLF) into a unmarried political entity.²² Established at San Francisco State College (later University), the TWLF was a radical educatee movement that critiqued the school's complicity with U.s.a. militarism and sought the establishment of an anticolonial "Third Earth" curriculum.²³ The motion'due south name spoke to its broad coalition (which included Black, Latinx, and Asian American students) likewise as its radical politics: the 1955 African-Asian Bandung Conference popularized the use of Third World to describe the bloc of Not-Aligned countries, many of them sometime colonies.²⁴ Later a year of escalating protests, the educatee strike at San Francisco State ended with the establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies in 1969, the first school of its kind, and the outset of ethnic studies, Asian American studies included.

In the decades since the Asian American movement, a modest only active cohort of scholars has worked tirelessly to trace new lines of inquiry in the study of Asian American art. Every bit a college student in New York, Margo Machida witnessed the anti-war, Civil Rights, and 3rd Earth Liberation movements, while simultaneously becoming enlightened "that parallel art worlds, support networks, and budding institutions existed alongside the largely white dominated art 'mainstream.'"²⁵ Her early criticism and curatorial work included projects for important customs arts organizations, including the Basement Workshop and Asian American Arts Eye, and for nearly four decades, her work has prepare the standard for the study of gimmicky Asian American artists.²⁶ Machida'southward 2009 book Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Arts and the Social Imaginary offers a trenchant overview of the debates about Asian American art and identity from the 1960s through the global turn of the 2000s.²⁷ The book elucidates the work of x artists of various indigenous backgrounds in relation to bug of racialization, trauma, migration, and transnational apportionment, an assay Machida based on extensive interviews. Her work models collaboration instead of top-down authority, suggesting the fashion ethical challenges engender (rather than inhibit, equally is oftentimes argued) new methods and lines of inquiry.

Mark Dean Johnson likewise witnessed the Civil Rights Movement while a college student. As a young faculty member at Humboldt State Academy in the 1980s, Johnson worked closely with Native artists and communities, an feel he describes every bit key to "my conception of my own responsibility as an academic."²⁸ Afterward joining the faculty of the San Francisco Art Found, and later San Francisco State, Johnson began an exhaustive investigation into the work of historical Asian American artists. Bated from his extensive curatorial career, discussed by Alexander in the concluding essay for this department, Johnson coedited the aforementioned Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 with Gordon Chang and Paul Karlstrom, the culmination of a years-long enquiry project conducted in part at Stanford University.

Karin Higa was working on a dissertation on the subject field of Japanese American photographers in Los Angeles at the fourth dimension of her death in 2013. Equally a curator at the Japanese American National Museum, Higa assembled shows of art fabricated in internment camps (1992), on furniture maker George Nakashima (2004), and on contemporary artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto (1999), amongst others. The daughter of Kazuo Higa, fine art historian and director of Los Angeles City College's Da Vinci Art Gallery, Higa grew up effectually artists. Her essay on photographer Robert A. Nakamura, who was interned with Higa'south begetter and took iconic photographs of Black artists such every bit Betye Saar, discusses the solidarity among Black and Asian American artists in 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles, who both knew "all too well the consequences of looking similar the enemy."²⁹

These scholars offer crucial lessons for the future study of Asian American art. Their formation in 1960s social movements gave them a articulate sense of the political stakes of their work and also attuned them to the importance of cross-ethnic coalitions and perspectives. Their subjects take required them to traverse boundaries not typically crossed by fine art historians: between academic and curatorial; scholarship and activism; art and customs; historical and contemporary. Their work suggests the flexibility, collaboration, and above all, trust required to produce scholarship on artists whose piece of work and histories are often located in private residences rather than institutions, in memories rather than archives, and whose affective charge, especially to the communities to which they belong, greatly exceed their monetary value.

In addition to Machida, Johnson, and Higa, Anthony W. Lee and ShiPu Wang have fabricated pregnant contributions to the understanding of artists of Asian descent in the Us. Lee'south book on San Francisco Chinatown (2001), his edited volume on the writings of Yun Gee (2003), and his remarkable study A Shoemaker'due south Story (2008) demonstrate the inseparability of domestic and international histories in the lives of Chinese immigrants.³⁰ Over the course of two meticulously researched books and a major exhibition, ShiPu Wang has similarly shown how a diasporic perspective allowed artists such as Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Miki Hayakawa, and Chiura Obata to critically appoint the thought of Americanness in calorie-free of war, nationhood, and race.³¹ Finally, important scholarly interventions have come from specialists of global contemporary fine art, including Midori Yoshimoto and Joan Kee.³² Their work shows the limitations of subfields such equally Asian, American, and modernistic and contemporary art and reimagines Asian American art every bit connoting connexion and movement rather than temporal or geographic borders.

"Asian American" Art and its Discontents

In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart–Celler Human activity) abolished the national origin quotas and exclusionary policies that had defined United States immigration policy from the mid-nineteenth century, leading to an influx of immigrants from countries such as Korea, Bharat, Islamic republic of pakistan, and Bangladesh.³³ American warmongering in Southeast Asia also created waves of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In the face up of these demographic shifts, the compiling of Asian ethnic groups nether a unmarried term began to appear less as a strategy of solidarity and more as a flattening of difference. Since the 1990s, scholars of Asian American studies have productively challenged and critiqued the idea of a single Asian America and its assumptions of cultural nationalism. Moreover, feminist and queer critiques by scholars including Elaine Kim and David Eng have laid bare the heteropatriarchal, masculinist assumptions embedded in early on conceptions of the term Asian American.³⁴

The most influential scholarly intervention of this period arguably came from Lisa Lowe, who showed how the figure of the white American citizen has been historically defined against the Asian immigrant, who is at one time assimilated and perpetually alien to the nation-land.³⁵ In contrast to the cultural nationalist supposition of a singular Asian America, Lowe focuses instead on the "heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity" of the term. In Lowe's 1996 book, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, a trenchant chapter on the contemporaneous phenomenon of multiculturalism is included, in which she writes:

[Multiculturalism] levels the important differences and contradictions within and amid racial and ethnic minority groups according to the discourse of pluralism, which asserts that American culture is a democratic terrain to which every variety of constituency has equal admission and in which all are represented, while simultaneously masking the existence of exclusions by recuperating dissent, conflict and otherness through the promise of inclusion.³⁶

Lowe's discussion helpfully situates recent calls for diversity and representation inside a longer history of multiculturalism, anticipating critiques of these strategies as superficial concessions designed to forestall structural change.³⁷ The wisdom of this critique is credible in a recent, deeply disturbing use of the term Asian American art.³⁸

On November xx, 2020, First Lady Melania Trump presided over the unveiling of Isamu Noguchi'southward sculpture, Floor Frame (fig. 3), in the Rose Garden. On her official Twitter account, Trump wrote that the piece of work "represents the of import contributions of Asian American artists."³⁹ This point was echoed in an article for ArtNews written by Stewart D. McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association. "As the first piece of work of art by an Asian American creative person in the White Business firm Collection," he wrote, "it is a milestone for the Asian American community."^xl Like virtually public relations stunts undertaken past the Trump Assistants, the announcement's shameless hypocrisy seemed and then over the tiptop that it felt like a troll. The First Lady's cocky-congratulatory mention of the "important contributions of Asian American artists" stood in direct contrast to the assistants'south xenophobic anti-Asian rhetoric around the COVID-19 crisis. Moreover, as fine art historian Amy Lyford pointed out, Noguchi was voluntarily interned during Earth War Two, an experience that fabricated him aware of the hypocrisy of being claimed every bit American.⁴¹ The event's flagrancy at least has the benefit of making absolutely clear the way superficial tokens of recognition advocate extant structures of power through the management of dissent. The lesson for the study of Asian American art is too articulate: mere visibility or inclusion within dominant structures, such as extant narratives of America or American art history, often serves to uphold those structures.

This point has besides been discussed past scholar Susette Min, who, as a curator in the 1990s, saw the representational burden placed upon artists by the term Asian American. Like Darby English, she argues that such labels freeze artists inside a "prepare-made set of interpretations already embedded in a viewer'south purview or imagination," and is moreover particularly sick-suited to account for the practices of artists whose piece of work "remains both open and multiple, and therefore elusively uncategorizable."⁴² To this bespeak, she helpfully reframes Asian American art as a soapbox rather than a discrete identity category.⁴³ Throughout this outcome, our own use of Asian American art accords with Min's important revision, besides as Lowe's earlier emphasis on heterogeneity and multiplicity. Withal, in her emphasis on aesthetic indeterminacy every bit a defense against categorization, Min may have been as well optimistic.

Fig. 3. Isamu Noguchi, Floor Frame, 1962, displayed at the White House, Washington DC, November 21, 2020. Photograph past Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images ©The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Correct Society (ARS), New York

In fact, Noguchi's Floor Frame reconfigures categorization itself. The work consists of two singled-out bronze sections: beams conjoined at a right bending, and a smaller piece that sits flush to the flooring. The gap between them creates the illusion of a unmarried form that dips below the ground before remerging. Every bit Noguchi wrote, "Thinking of the floor, I made Floor Frame. I made other pieces in relation to floor space at the time, but this seemed to best define the essentiality of the floor, non equally sculpture lone but as function of the concept of floor."⁴⁴ The argument situates Floor Frame as function of the creative person'due south longstanding investigation of the co-constitutive nature of sculpture and the world around information technology. For Noguchi, the "essentiality" of the floor can merely be apprehended in relation to the forms around it. In this piece of work, the flooring at once supports the sculpture and is a plane that can exist breached by its bronze beams. It is unclear if the frame of Flooring Frame is broken or incomplete, for the two pieces practise not cohere into a airtight structure. Thus the frame of Flooring Frame does not enclose, merely moves through the floor. "To frame" is not simply to confine within a single definition but to show how all things are divers in relation to each other. Flooring is "space" rather than a solid.

Yet Floor Frame'south complex investigation of categorization does not prevent information technology from being racialized. Trump's full tweet well-nigh Floor Frame reads: "The art slice is humble in scale, complements the dominance of the Oval Office, & represents the important contributions of Asian American artists." The discussion "humble" rehearses the racist trope of Asian American men as less vigorous or assertive than white men, a meaning made explicit in the next clause: "complements" may have well been "submits to."⁴⁵ The sculpture's abstract grapheme is no defense against this racist description. It is besides conceivable that Floor Frame'due south lack of overt representational content offered a blank into which Trump could project her racist fantasies of the piece of work's pregnant, rather than a bulwark against such fantasies. Perhaps aesthetic indeterminacy and the refusal of categorization as an alternative to racialization is no alternative at all.

Tolerating the Paradox

The example of Noguchi at the White Business firm presents a paradox. To be articulate, in describing the way the sculpture—and Noguchi—have been racialized and mobilized past correct-wing forces, I am not saying that they are defined solely by their misuse. Floor Frame exceeds both its racist framing and the more politically palatable, simply no less reductive, reading of it as a mere illustration of the creative person'south identity. At the same time, Noguchi's life, his art, and his work'southward reception in the present is conditioned by the structures that have historically sought to circumscribe his existence: racism, xenophobia, and nationalism.⁴⁶ Merely as Floor Frame is at one time enclosure and opening, Asian American artists are ineluctably confined past and exceed the structures in which they be.

Art offers a place to linger with this paradox. Equally scholar Timothy Yu has observed, the past 30 years of Asian American studies have been shaped by a text authored by an creative person: Dictée (1982) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.⁴⁷ Built-in in South Korea in 1951, Cha studied fine art and comparative literature at University of California, Berkeley, and motion-picture show theory in France with scholars such equally Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, and Thierry Kuntzel. Working across functioning, video, and poetry, her art explores issues of linguistic communication, translation, and loss, which are also fundamental concerns in Dictée. Published posthumously after her rape and murder in 1982, the experimental text intersperses images and snippets of biography, Greek and Korean mythology, and history written in English, Korean, and French.⁴⁸ With its fractured, recursive class, the text evokes experiences of memory, trauma, and geographical displacement. As Yu implies, Dictée'due south purchase for Asian American studies arguably lies in its paradoxical power to deconstruct and affirm the importance of structures such as race, identity, and history: "Fine art becomes the crucial context inside which issues of theory and identity can exist played out, where acts can be both referential and performative, both abstruse and physical."⁴⁹

If fine art is both abstract and concrete, referential and performative, then also is race.^fifty Art'southward ability to embody this paradox makes it a potent site of investigation for a racialized discipline. The ethical claiming of writing most Asian American artists is to respect, rather than to solve, the paradox of their beingness. We must neither deny the effects of structural violence on their lives and piece of work nor reduce their practices to these structures.⁵¹ We must respect the depth and boundlessness of their imaginations, the conceptual and emotional richness of their aesthetic propositions, while also recognizing the mode such experiments often, but not always, ascend from specific experiences of violence, confinement, dehumanization, and grief. To see their art, we must agree all of these things together. Nosotros must also ask ourselves what we desire from these artists—representation, resistance, heroism, education, certainty, and absolution come to mind—and how these desires further constrain them. Finally, we must wonder, as many of these artists have wondered, and go along to wonder, how to practise more than than reverberate the world—simply to alter it. It is time to turn our attending to the basis on which Floor Frame sits. How deep practice its bronze roots penetrate, and how might we imagine them cracking the foundation on which they rest?

Essay Summaries

The essays in Asian American Art: Pasts and Futures bridge the late nineteenth century to the present and include considerations of fine fine art, material culture, fine art criticism, and curatorial practice. Authors address the specific histories and experiences of artists of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Indian descent. This selection is not comprehensive, and indeed we reject the idea that comprehensiveness is possible when it comes to Asian American art. Comprehensiveness implies that perfect representation is doable, when in fact, like anything, Asian American fine art merely becomes more unruly, expansive, and circuitous the more deeply 1 engages it. At the same time, we acknowledge that this section has limitations in telescopic. Although several authors take a transnational perspective, the case studies are, for the nigh office, United States–based. Moreover, most of the authors focus on artists from the e or west coasts. We hope that these gaps will offer a provocation and invitation to scholars by suggesting how much work remains to be done.

Z. Serena Qiu'southward essay is propelled by an affectively intense moment in the archive, in which she encounters an paradigm of a nameless Chinese American woman produced as souvenir for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Qiu uses the picture every bit a starting bespeak for an investigation of what she describes equally the "destructive visual marvel" about Chinese women's bodies in the United States, and the part of photography in the proliferation, management, clarification, and over-description of their images. Qiu ultimately uses the essay to explore her own desires and obligations as an art historian tasked with ascertaining certainty, concluding that her role is not to gear up these women, but to "abet their ongoing escape."

Yinshi Lerman-Tan considers the writing of Sadakichi Hartmann, who in 1901 authored the two-volume survey A History of American Art. Her disquisitional reappraisal of Hartmann's writing shows how his ain uncertain naturalization status inflected his understanding of American in this early on survey of American fine art. Lerman-Tan also explores the vexed question of Orientalism in his work and life, noting his recognition of its operations in the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, likewise as his deliberate performance of Orientalist tropes, suggesting the compromises required to survive as a person of Japanese descent in the United States during the early twentieth century.

Tyrus Wong is best known as the lead animator of Bambi, but as Karen Fang shows, perhaps his richest contribution to American visual culture was his partnership with Hallmark. For nearly twenty-five years, Wong designed dozens of bestselling greeting cards for the company. Her diligent archival reconstruction reveals the extent of the popularity of the cards but also locates their broad appeal in what Christian Klein has dubbed "Cold War Orientalism." Fang'due south essay suggests the importance of commercial art—artistic work that paid—to Asian American artists who might have few other options for a sustainable vocation.

The question of work is as well at stake in Catherine Damman'southward essay, which considers the belatedly 1960s sculpture of Los Angeles artist Carl Cheng. His objects assume the guise of outmoded, inefficient, and ultimately useless technological gadgets, which she deftly links to contemporaneous unease well-nigh the utopian promises of applied science and the racialization of Asians as "having a putatively unusual capacity for economic modernity." In their refusal to work, Cheng's "broken systems" thematize the empty promises of capitalist efficiency while highlighting the incomprehension of conventional narratives of postwar fine art to the intersections of labor and race.

Sadia Shirazi's essay considers the Dialectics of Isolation, a 1980 exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery curated by artists Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina. She traces the exhibition's genesis to a special issue of the feminist magazine Heresies, which used the term "Third World Women" to indicate an international coalition of women-identifying artists in direct opposition to what they described equally the "white, eye-course" emphasis of Us feminism. In dissimilarity to retrospective attempts to circumscribe the exhibition into liberal narratives of multiculturalism, Shirazi shows how Dialectics of Isolation was originally informed by decolonial perspectives.

Eunyoung Park as well takes a transnational perspective in her essay surveying the collaborative efforts of Korean American artists in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. These artists organized exhibitions and cultural events, and they formed the SEORO Korean Cultural Network to support their efforts. Park'southward attentiveness to the political and creative contexts of both Korea and the United states allows her to tease out a nuanced picture of the questions, activities, and concerns of Korean artists who arrived in the U.s.a. during this period. She shows how contact with established Asian American cultural groups led these artists to reflect on their own position in the United States and besides offered a model for collaborative artistic work and advocacy.

Three final essays examine the practices of contemporary Asian American artists grappling with history. Jenni Sorkin considers Tina Takemoto's date with the archive of Jiro Onuma, a gay Japanese American man who was incarcerated at Topaz State of war Relocation Center. In Takemoto'southward motion picture Looking for Jiro, they imagine Onuma's work at Topaz's mess hall as a musical revue reminiscent of both Broadway and queer society civilisation, the site of Takemoto'south own drag king performances. Sorkin calls the performance "a joyful comprehend of high camp as a strategy to mitigate the oppressions of camp life," a fantastical apotheosis of history that crosses normative gender and temporal structures. Takemoto's transhistoricism locates queer want in the closets of history not to deny the privations of incarceration but to show all that exceeds its grasp.

Ellen Tani'south essay explores the work of Filipino American artists Jerome Reyes  and Maia Cruz Palileo. Both use photography and the archive, traditionally tools of racial formation and colonial management, to engage key moments in history: United states warmongering and colonialism in the Philippines at the showtime of the twentieth century, the Third World Liberation Front, and the eviction of tenants from First International Hotel, or I-Hotel, a low-income, unmarried-occupancy residential hotel in San Francisco's Manilatown. Working across video, installation, and painting, Tani argues that these artists engage historical archives not simply to remember or preserve history but to redirect the tools of its construction.

Finally, Hsuan Hsu'southward essay examines the colonial intimacies conjured by the olfactory practices of Beatrice Glow. Glow'due south appointment with global luxury products such as silk, tobacco, and spices foregrounds the textile exchanges engendered by entwined processes of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racial commercialism. Her work is therefore coinciding with Lisa Lowe'south contempo scholarship, as well every bit the transpacific and archipelagic turns in Asian American studies. Glow'due south canny engagement with scent reveals the extractive colonial desire that undergirds the history of perfume, while also acknowledging the shared but uneven histories of dispossession and colonialism among Asian and Indigenous people beyond the Pacific.

Cite this article: Marci Kwon, introduction to "Asian American Art, Pasts and Futures," Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 1 (Spring 2021), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.11446.

PDF: Kwon, introduction to Asian American Art, Past and Futures

Notes

The writer is grateful to Mark Dean Johnson and Margo Machida for their feedback on this Introduction.

About the Author(s): Marci Kwon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander is Assistant Curator of American Art at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. They are Co-Directors of the Cantor's Asian American Art Initiative.

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Source: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/asian-american-art/

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