Art Review: Renegotiating Now and Then “One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now”
The “One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” exhibition showcases a selection of artists with Asian American backgrounds at the Asia Society Gallery and Museum until December 1, 2006. The curators, Melissa Chiu of the Asia Society, Karin Higa of the Japanese American National Museum and Suzette Min, an art professor at UCLA have come together to perform a difficult and ambitious task – ” to represent within the small space of a gallery, a sense of the diversity and excitement generated by Asian American artists. What results is an exhibit that dares to re-enter the realm of identity-driven curatorial practice. Now post-identity art and post-’90s multicultural backlash, the show brings up decade old questions of the relevance of the categorization of “Asian American Art” on artists, artworks and the art world at large today.
his exhibition is less about the similar trajectories of Asian American artists or the foregrounding their émigré backgrounds
Unlike the “Asia/America” show in 1994, curated by Margo Machida, which was the very first contemporary art exhibition and Asian American art show at the Asia Society, this exhibition is less about the similar trajectories of Asian American artists or the foregrounding their émigré backgrounds and the impact of immigration and global trajectories on the artists’ works, and instead focuses on the specific works of a gathering of diverse artists. In both cases, the immense range of medium and intention is highlighted.
However, in “One Way Or Another,” the title of the show selected due to its direct pop cultural reference that the curators found important in many of the artists works, the notion of the transcultural experience is more subdued in its curatorial presentation. Yet it still exists in subtle ways such as through Glenn Kaino’s clever display of taxonomy in his Graft (2006) pieces created for the show in which he crafts together a patchwork of animal skins to form a whole other animal. For example he sews together the skins of a shark to create a salmon, and the skins of a cow to create a pig form.
Set in the halls of Asia Society’s galleries, the pieces, enshrined in their own viewing cases call back to the specimens of animals sealed within a natural history museum. Viewed within such a framework and mythology of curiosity, science, artwork, fact, the pieces are a strong component to the exhibit and the underlining difficulties of artists under the lens of identity-driven art categories. Yet read another way, the works also play, as indicated within the accompanying catalogue, directly with the wave of “make-over” TV shows that have become popular, again calling into question the presentation of what is real and what is artificial.
While the show within the galleries is more or less severed from the historical legacy that has brought about Asian American art and where it sits, avoiding artworks from artist collectives such as Godzilla, the exhibit bounds forward in an attempt to situate Asian American art in a new light where these younger generation artists are artists without necessary identification with race, and the politics of identity is less driven as the unifier of Asian identity than as a mere fact that has taken a back seat on the artistic and curatorial agenda. In fact, the curators took a willful approach of selecting artists who were born in the “60s and “70s. While this point of view is in respects refreshing, it also poses questions as to the acknowledgement of how this exhibit situates within the Asian American art historical context and skirts the general lack of mainstream knowledge on Asian American art and its foundational history of which both curators Karin Higa and Suzette Min were core participants during the ’90s. During that time, artist such as Epoxy and Godzilla were establishing a foundation on which several Asian American artists were to migrate, however small yet fundamentally tectonic the movement, into the mainstream.
However, where the exhibition lacks in this respect, the catalogue for the exhibition serves as a tie back into the past for a contextual look at the exhibition with essays from formidable players in the Asian American community, including by Helen Zia, who sets the historical tone for the stage on which Asian America comes into the mainstream consciousness. Karen Higa’s piece, a personal essay about her experience within the artist collective Godzilla, is a window into the iconic Asian American collective at its most vulnerable, playful and influential. Higa’s personal account of past collectivity and political project is able to present a seeming contrast to the artists within the show as well as the presentation of the artists as somehow set apart from this past. Yet it is with Suzette Min’s essay playfully titled “The Last Asian American Exhibition In the Whole Entire World,” in which Min rexamines the underlying issues that stigmatize ethnic-specific shows and Margo Machida’s essay “Reframing Asian America” that the show comes into a framework that is able to finally contextualize the artists in the exhibition in relation to the very term “Asian American Art” from which the show itself refers. Recognizing the difficulties of curatorial practice in relation to such survey shows within moments in time in which exhibitions are created as well as the importance of place and trends of interest, Machida sets forth: “Every Asian American exhibition, therefore, is inevitably a partial view of a particular time and place that provides a selective cross-section of that larger body of work.” And indeed “One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” is no different, yet makes an effort.
As one veers past the two striking Graft works by Glenn Kaino entering the galleries, viewers may choose to go right or left to visit the pieces of the other artists scattered about on the third floor of the museum. The intimate works of New York-based installation artist Jean Shin stands out in this regard with her ability to transform and make sense of space and placement in relation to her medium and final installation. In her work, a wall of sweaters unfurls itself about the gallery. Stitched into this collection of sweaters are labels indicating the many names of curators and many of those connected to the Asian American art community, with the word “unraveled” poetically underlining the work and relationship to the previous owners of the sweaters. According to the literature about the artists available to viewers of the exhibit, this site-specific piece will be altered when brought to each venue that the show will travel to, in order to reflect the space in which it is shown. Her work serves as a connector within the space of the gallery, created by a web of lines that run throughout the space as if an attempt to create community and connectivity where one is seemingly out of reach or simply non-existent except for this presence of these threads.
At the side wall of one room, the work of Kaz Oshiro converts a part of the gallery into an everyday space with his Trash Bin (2006) and his Cabinet pieces. They look like your everyday urban apartment kitchen cabinet or a public trash can. But looks are deceiving, as the painterly quality of the trompe l’oeil pieces re-posits them into the realm of art works, thus once again reconfiguring the space of the gallery into art space again. The pieces also bring in elements of nostalgia with fake stickers painted on the pieces referencing rock bands from the past couple decades.
Laurel Nakadate’s video pieces such as Love Hotel and Other Stories (2005) perch the artist in a dangerous space of human relationships with lone middle aged men who she encounters upon the creation of these video pieces. For the artist, the interaction of one person in the realm of another and their influence on their lives are under the investigative watch of her video lens. At the while conscious of herself as both a woman, instigator of the interaction, documenter, and yet playful personality, she stages and creates these videos that speak to both the lives of these men she befriends as well as to the imagined realities of the artist at play.
Unfortunately the work of Xavier Cha is only represented as a documented piece of performance art and lacks the vibrancy of the actual performance. The show includes the large cutout image of “Horn of Plenty,” one of three characters created by Cha that consisted of a large cornucopia of fruits and vegetables with the artist lying amid the abundance, and a teasing video documentation of the project that included these characters, “Holiday Cruise!” (2006), a month-long performance piece the artist conducted at the Taxter and Spengemann Gallery in New York. There is also a vibrant mural by New York-based artist Chitra Ganesh that should not be missed, sitting apart from the rest of exhibition on the lower floor of the museum. The size of the mural overwhelms the viewer as they are impressed with the artist’s use of plastics, glitters, paint and disfigured forms – ” at times troubling with the ferocity of the imagery and at times prompting the viewer to engage in the playfulness of the medium and dream-like quality of the artistic form itself.
Selected from the urban centers of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York as well as San Jose, Atlanta, Chicago, other artists displayed within this exhibit include Patty Chang, Michael Arcega, Indigo Som, Binh Danh, Mari Eastman, Ala Ebtekar, Geraldine Lau, Anna Sew Hoy, Mika Tajima, Saira Wasim and Jiha Moon. The catalogue for “One Way Or Another: Asian American Art Now” is available at the Asia Society museum shop and online at www.asiasociety.org.