It may be widely used now but the term “Asian American” is only a few decades old, being coined in 1968 by UC Berkeley activists Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka, as they sought an umbrella identity for their student organization, eventually hitting on the Asian American Political Alliance. The term caught on in part because it replaced the term “oriental”, widely considered to be racist and associated with aggressive campaigns of colonialism, and partly because it allowed the wider community of immigrants from Asia to band together to wield greater political influence.
The term remains popular but it has faced its share of criticism, among other things for obscuring the realities of those from less economically powerful and geographically centered Asian nations. An intriguing new art exhibition currently on show at New York University’s 80WSE Gallery seeks to interrogate and deconstruct the term while bringing forth an extremely wide variety of art created from within the community.
Featuring well over 100 works from some 90 different creators, Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City exhibits a vibrant and jam-packed array of aesthetics, movements, media and artistic philosophies, offering a show that is extremely dense, layered and nuanced.
Show co-curator Howie Chen explained that the exhibition originated from a desire to map out the Asian American art experience in New York City in a way that was comparable to what has been done for the west coast art scene. “We wanted to see if we could put together the big brushstrokes for three decades of Asian American diasporic activities in this city,” he told me. Chen sought to in his words “add the s”, telling the story of many Asian American art movements happening throughout New York City.
In finding these many narratives of Asian American art on the east coast, Chen and his collaborators spent years exploring the work of three key organizations – Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, the Basement Workshop and Asian American Arts Centre – all of which acted as hubs for art in New York and collectively were active from 1968 through the turn of the century. This allowed Chen and co-curators Jayne Cole Southard and Christina Ong to dig deep into the archives and subcultures of the many art aesthetics collected under the banner of Asian American art.
The show feels almost dizzying in its capaciousness, offering so many different eras, aesthetics and media that it can feel like a lot to take in. The vertiginous sense of being within Legacies is much to the point. In curating the show, Chen has made choices that have attempted to undermine dominant beliefs about Asian American art in favor of deconstructing preconceived notions and inviting in a certain amount of anarchy. He was happy to hold Legacies in a university gallery, where he believes that the art can be experienced as much more porous than in museums, where things are generally more bordered and immediately legible.
For instance, holding Legacies in a university gallery space gave Chen freedom to get rid of the standard wall texts, an intervention that he believes is decisive. (Audiences instead have the option of accessing them via a QR code.) Chen explained that this leads to disorientation and forces visitors to be less reliant on received ideas about the art. While this may impose more of a barrier to the casual visitor who may crave a degree of structure, it is much to Chen’s point of letting the art lead. “I wanted the experience of the show to be an aesthetic experience first,” he said. “So you get a sense of the stakes at hand from the art itself, and then you start stitching it together from your subjectivity. You can draw relationships that may get shut down if there’s a text on the wall.”
Among other artists in the show, Chen spoke proudly of being able to exhibit the art of David Diao, a Chinese American creative who for five decades and counting has worked to deconstruct the major tenants of modernist art. His thorough examination of how dominant narratives are established and whom they exclude made him a natural fit for Legacies, which exhibits his massive abstract piece Odd Man Out – standing front and center just past the show’s entrance – and his conceptual Imperiled, from his Yellow Peril series.
“On the surface, it looks like the throes and pangs of painting modernist forms,” Chen said, “but if you look at his work deeper, it’s about the western canon, being outside of it, what it means to inscribe yourself into it.”
Another significant artist exhibited in Legacies is Hanh Thi Pham, whose 1985 photograph Self Portrait/Hairy/Pipe sits prominently with a wall all to itself. The work shows the artist in a black-and-white image, wearing a long white shirt and bearing a stern expression on her face, clutching a pipe suggestively before her mouth. A refugee of the Vietnam war, Pham is known for taking on Eurocentric tropes in order to complicate and destabilize them.
In Self Portrait/Hairy/Pipe, Pham deconstructs the significance of the pipe to western thought, referencing, among others, Sigmund Freud, Sherlock Holmes and René Magritte’s pipe. The image brings up questions around what it means to be an Asian woman in America, as well as the conditions that created Pham’s forced migration to this country.
“I became really obsessed with this photo,” Chen said. “When I saw this image, I was like, This is it, this image is like the Mona Lisa, it’s sly in all the right ways. It invokes a history that is under-seen, that I can draw out, and it can draw researchers and academics into the minor histories.”
The response to Legacies thus far has been strong, appealing especially to other curators and academics who are struggling with the same questions around representation that Chen dealt with in putting together his show. “Seeing people walk through it, it’s really prismatic,” he said. “Academics, industry curators, everyone is wrestling with this idea of how to represent. It’s been great to talk to other curators about the experience of organizing a show like this.”
At the same time, Chen very much hopes that Legacies is something that anyone can enter and find their own way through, having a meaningful experience with the art. “The show is dense, but it’s really designed for people to encounter in different ways. In the end it’s about the aesthetic encounter.”
Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (1969-2001) is now on show at 80WSE Gallery in New York City until 20 December
