ASIAN POP / Art Breakers
A new generation of Asian American artists challenges outmoded expectations of what it means to be Asian, American and — for that matter — a “new generation.”
By Jeff Yang
Monday, October 16, 2006
When you step into the atrium leading to Asia Society’s new exhibition of works by contemporary Asian American artists, “One Way or Another: Asian American Arts Now,” you’re immediately confronted by a pair of sculptures created by L.A.-based Glenn Kaino: a stuffed salmon, its body crisscrossed with sutures holding together a “suit” made of sharkskin patches; a pig, similarly sewn into a sheath made of the hide of a cow.
The Frankensteinian duo is shocking, mesmerizing — and provocative. Are these figures a commentary on the idea of Asian American identity — as a Trojan horse, as a disguise, as an awkwardly synthetic mash-up? Are they a subversive statement about the exhibition itself, nestled as it is within a building traditionally better known for programs removed by space or time from the here and now (like the concurrent showcase on a lower floor, “Gilded Splendor: Treasures of China’s Liao Empire”)? Or are they placed there simply because they’re beautiful and strange, and thus exemplary of the exciting cacophony of the works represented in this new exhibition?
There may be something valid about all three notions, but it’s the third that ends up being the most relevant and resonant. The works in “One Way or Another,” which brings together 17 artists — mostly born in the ’70s and raised or living in the United States, including six from the Bay Area — are pleasantly uncategorizable. They go together, well, like a pig in a cow suit. And by virtue of being so conceptually diverse, so defiantly without formula, they reveal a maturation, or at least an evolution, in the way that these creators view the very ideas of Asianness, Americanness and art itself.
Like its 1994 predecessor, the groundbreaking “Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art,” “One Way” seeks to present something of a generational portrait of Asian American artists and to bring it to major venues across the nation, including, in September 2007, the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum.
But “Asia/America” focused on artists who were born in Asia and perceived themselves as immigrants. Their works shared a certain set of preoccupations, issues of displacement, loss, assimilation and racism. Those works conceptually hung from or clung to the slash in the exhibition’s title — works like Pacita Abad’s “How Mali Lost Her Accent,” a painting of a young Asian woman surrounded by representations of American achievement, like acceptance letters to Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley; or Tseng Kwong Chi’s self-portraits of himself in a Mao jacket, standing in front of American monuments like Mount Rushmore and the Hollywood sign.
“Nineteen ninety-four was the height of the identity politics debates in U.S., and it was kind of a lightning-rod show, which attracted a lot of attention and debate,” says Melissa Chiu, Asia Society museum director. “The departure point for this exhibition was to actively create a contrast to that show” — because, for over a decade, “Asia America” was the only major group exhibition of Asian American artists to tour major venues nationwide.
“It was a smart show, but I felt like some of the art didn’t really speak to me, because I was born here, in the U.S.,” says Berkeley resident and UC Davis professor Susette Min, who curated “One Way” with Chiu
and Karin Higa of L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum. “And unfortunately, for a lot of people that one exhibition became the show that said what Asian American art was all about.”
But in seeking to provide a counterpoint to that show, the curators ran into the same questions faced by that show’s curator, Margo Machida. “The biggest thing we had to address was what constitutes ‘Asian American arts.'” says Min. “Is it art created by an artist who identifies as Asian American? Is it art created by an artist who has at least one parent who’s Asian? Is it art that has something thematically associated with being Asian in America? Does it have to be politically motivated, or engaged with ‘traditionally’ Asian American issues?” Machida’s show reflected its era — it depicted Asian American identity, or Asian America’s multiple identities. But as Min, Chiu, and Higa visited dozens of studios and looked at hundreds of slides, they realized that the freshest and brightest new work they saw wasn’t being defined or dominated by identity at all.
Ultimately, say Min and Chiu, they chose to include the most visually appealing, conceptually engaging Asian artists living and working in the United States today. With just a few exceptions, they turned out to be younger artists, members of a generation of Asian Americans born in the post-civil rights era.
“For a lot of these artists, there’s a comfort level, almost an innocence about being Asian. Compared to previous ones, they have less of a conflicted sense of self,” says Chiu. “I take Laurel Nakadate as an example. When we invited her to participate in this show, she said: ‘Oh, yeah, that sounds kinda fun. I’ve never been in a show like that before.'”
Valid Forms of ID
Some have suggested that this newly blase attitude toward race is due to the fact that identity politics has faded in relevance. According to this conventional wisdom, the ’90s were both the apex and the last hurrah for multiculturalism — and with the arrival of the millennium, American society and the people of color who live within it began a steady and inexorable move away from being defined by ethnicity.
But that’s a simplistic and ultimately misleading view of the situation. Just because identity isn’t the tent pole of this generation’s lives doesn’t mean that race and the issues around it have been erased. It’s actually closer to the truth to say that race has been embraced — in a way that’s more immersive, more natural, more instinctive and more complicated than in previous generations.
Here’s an anecdote to illustrate the distinction: As a little kid, I always thought that the term “A.D.” (as in A.D. 2006) meant “After Death” — because the Christian era, which Western culture uses as an anchor point for history, began with the death of Jesus Christ. It wasn’t until I was coerced into studying Latin in junior high that my misperception was corrected: A.D. stands for “Anno Domini,” or “In the Year of Our Lord.” The Christian era, I was told, doesn’t reference the death of Christ but his victory and universality.
By extension, one might say that the end of the “multicultural era” didn’t represent the death of race but, to some extent, its triumph — we live in A.I., Anno Identitate, an era in which race has become a permanent and intrinsic part of our social and perceptual makeup. Kids born in the ’70s and later have grown up with the concept of race as a fixed part of the social landscape. It’s a check box on every form, a standard item in every cultural inventory. Whether or not they choose to emphasize it, they recognize it as a valid and instrumental part of their reality.
Which means that for the artists represented in “One Way,” race and ethnicity are always there: It’s part of the air they breathe. And because of that, it’s kind of no big deal: It can be laughed at, toyed with and teased; it can be gently celebrated, cheekily exposed or simply allowed to fade gently into the woodwork.
Looking at it through that lens, one can sense subtle, perhaps unconscious comments on ethnic identity in many of “One Way”‘s works. Xavier Cha’s blissfully prankish performance pieces speak to the feeling of being an outsider — sometimes watching, sometimes being treated as a spectacle. Kaz Oshiro’s trompe l’oeil sculptures of household appliances and trash bins force viewers into an awareness that appearances are only skin deep. And Jiha Moon’s fantastical canvases draw hybrid inspiration from Asian culture and American pop — showing the influence of both ancient brush paintings and modern manga, while building from a palette of colors like “Superman blue” and “Wonder Woman red.”
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But these traces of racial awareness wash back and forth, rather than cresting and crashing. Sometimes ethnicity serves as figure, sometimes as ground. This generation’s self-perception is assembled on-the-go based on whim, environment and the demands of the occasion. It’s identity as iPod playlist.
Mood Indigo
Here’s what’s on Indigo Som’s ID playlist: “Book artist. Textile artist. Woman artist. Asian American artist … for some reason, I haven’t really been put into the queer artist category yet. But, you know, it’s always this fine line we walk between saying, ‘This is who I am, this is a community that’s important to me,’ and being put into a ghetto, where no one outside that community will ever know about you.”
Som’s contributions to “One Way” — three wistful yet oddly vibrant photographs from her series of Chinese restaurants in the Deep South — tiptoe softly along that fine line.
The fact that they’re Chinese restaurants certainly has special meaning to Som, a resident of Berkeley who grew up in a household where authentic Chinese food was abundant and who admits to being both appalled and fascinated upon first encountering Americanized concoctions like chop suey and crab Rangoon. She calls Chinese restaurants “the most pervasively visible and yet unacknowledged” facet of Chinese American presence in the United States.
“You’ll be in a small town, with no Asian folks in sight, and bang, you’ll run into a Chinese restaurant,” she says. “Who owns it, and how’d they end up here? A lot of times, it’s not even Chinese people — it’s Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thai, who end up running these restaurants, because nobody around them has any idea what their native cuisine is all about. Maybe you’ll have one rebellious menu item like pad thai sitting in the middle of the noodle section, but the rest of the menu defaults to Chinese. For a lot of Americans, it’s the only Asian food they know.”
Yet Som’s goal in documenting them isn’t limited to picturing unexpected Chineseness. She sees these establishments as potent icons of persistence and resistance.
“If you go into small-town America, so often the Chinese restaurant is the only mom-and-pop establishment left,” says Som. “It’s literally the last thing holding on. Everything around it is identical and corporate — McDonald’s, Wal-Mart. I feel like they’ve become a remarkable set of anachronistic holdouts. Part of what I wanted to do was to have a conversation with some of those classic urban landscape studies taken in the late ’70s and early ’80s by photographers like Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. The uniqueness and personality they depicted, most of that’s gone. This is what’s left.”
It’s not that Som’s works aren’t informed by her identity — it’s that it doesn’t dominate or conscribe them. “To be honest, I’m kind of suspicious of how much attention the Chinese Restaurant Project has gotten,” says Som. “I can’t help but feel just a little weird about that.” She wonders whether the project — which includes her photographs, a blog of her restaurant-search road trip and a massive collection of menus sent to her from all over the world — might have accidentally painted her into the “ethnic artist” corner.
It’s a label she’s avoided so far, even in previous musings around ethnicity. Som’s earliest works include two sets of art books — “Howards & Hoovers” and “No One to Call Home/Girl” — that explore the often anachronistic given names of male and female Chinese American acquaintances: Felton, Edmond, Winston; Jade, Pearl, Harmony. But as with her Chinese restaurant photos, her goal isn’t to accentuate their strangeness or exotic quality but simply to collect them, embrace them and thus normalize them.
“For me, it was kind of a warm, fuzzy community thing,” she says. “I just started accumulating these names and seeing what they added up to. I was trying to say, ‘This is who I know, this is my experience, and it’s funny and odd, and absolutely mundane.'” One name stands out; a hundred of them end up blurring together, transforming the unusual into the commonplace and the commonplace into the unusual. Which is ultimately the persistent theme of Som’s work — she delights in the task of breaking down the world into its individual component bits and building it up again, pixel by pixel, accumulating new meaning along the way.
Language Lessens
If Indigo Som’s artistic sensibility was shaped by fairy tales, fellow Bay Area artist Mike Arcega admits that his is anchored in jokes. “Growing up, I had a good friend, and we’d always be pretending we misheard each other — it was kind of a running gag: ‘Eh? What did you say? Rat turtle under the water?'” says Arcega. “That kind of humor is so much a part of Filipino culture — like the joke about the pinoy who’s told to use the name ‘Paul’ in a sentence three times, and says ‘Be carepaul, you might paul in the swimming paul.'”
But it wasn’t until he was exposed to the work of media artists Gary Hill and Bruce Nauman that he realized how wordplay and images could be used in a creative context. Hill’s videos of people speaking in palindromes, Nauman’s neon signs bearing phrases like “RUN FROM FEAR/FUN FROM REAR” — these gave Arcega artistic license to create his own works that construct meaning out of whimsy.
His extraordinary contribution to “One Way” is a 15-foot scale model of Noah’s ark, constructed with incredible detail. Upon peering within the model, one doesn’t see miniature animals but rather hanging strips of dried flesh — jerky made of exotic animal meats like kangaroo, ostrich and yak. The title of the work is “Eternal Salivation.”
“I originally wanted to explore this incredible arrogance that people have about interpreting the Bible as giving them the right to go out and have dominion over the Earth and all living things,” says Arcega. “But then the tsunami happened, and then Katrina, and that idea ended up becoming fused with this survivalist idea. So this piece depicts this interplay between these two senses of the word preservation: preservation of life, and preservation of food for consumption.”
Arcega’s visual wisecrack illuminates how quickly greed grows out of need. The use of puns is a running theme throughout his work, an irony supplement that sparks a smile and then forces further reflection. It also allows him to explore topics rooted in his identity that, without the leavening power of humor, might never be engaged or confronted outside the Asian American community.
“The thing that inspired my very first piece was reminiscing about how in the Philippines we grew up with Spam as this breakfast meat,” says Arcega. “And I thought to myself, ‘Why do we eat this stuff?’ Well, after a little bit of research, I realized that it was a military ration that was disseminated throughout Asia by American GIs. Because of that, there was this potency in using Spam as a material. And then I realized, if you take the word Spam and flip it, it becomes ‘maps.’ So I started making maps out of Spam.”
“SPAM/MAPS” came into being almost simultaneously with another work, “Filipino Anthem,” which presents the results Arcega got when he ran the lyrics for “Lupang Hinirang,” the national anthem of the Philippines, through a computer spelling checker.
“It always annoyed me how my name would always get corrected whenever I typed it out in a word processor,” he says. “So I took that one step further: I made a video of me running the Filipino anthem through spell check while humming it at the same time. I ended up with this beautiful gibberish: poetic and playful and fun, but also with this darker subtext that was about assimilating but not really assimilating. So it ended up incorporating two things that I really like — it was a little bit humorous, and it had a little bit of meat.” (Though not, in this case, literally.)
The interesting thing is that Arcega, like Som, sees these subtle points of difference — Spam for breakfast, English as a close-second language — as opportunities, as unique and valuable assets. “They’re what make us interesting,” says Arcega. “We’re all in it together, but these are the things, these little jewels, that spice up our culture.”
The Last Section of the Last Review of the Last Asian American Exhibition in the Whole Entire World
The title of Susette Min’s essay in the catalogue for “One Way or Another” is “The Last Asian American Exhibition in the Whole Entire World.” Despite the implied gauntlet of the title, Min doesn’t claim that “One Way” is or even should be the last word on Asian American arts. Far from it: She affirms the critical need for more such shows, yet acknowledges that staging them will be progressively more difficult and increasingly controversial.
“I’ve always thought the best way to promote Asian American artists isn’t necessarily in identity-based exhibitions but through integrating them into exhibitions where their work is engaged with other artists’ works,” says Min. “On the other hand, as an Asian American scholar and critic, I believe issues of racism still exist — complicated, subtle issues that are not addressed in the art world. And somehow, they need to be foregrounded. The question is how.”
The answer, Min suggests, is not fewer Asian American exhibitions, but more — organized not solely around identity but also around affinity. Shared ideas, common themes, collective issues. Kearny Street Workshop’s “Pirated” show in 2005 — subtitled “A Post Asian Perspective” — featured the work of 11 Asian Bay Area artists, including Indigo Som and Mike Arcega, each speaking to the idea of theft and infringement. The theme reigned supreme, but the interpretation of that theme allowed artists to evoke issues tied to identity, like the tyranny of majority, the desire for freedom of language and expression, the nature of cultural colonialism.
“Color of skin, race, ethnicity, it’s not enough anymore,” says Arcega. “When I was an undergrad at art school, we started a group of Filipino American artists. And ultimately, we kind of realized that there wasn’t anything holding us together other than all of us being Filipino American. Soon after that question started bouncing around, the organization fell apart. If you’re going to put us together in one place, we need to have a topic to focus on, a different kind of framing. For this exhibition, it really was an admission that there isn’t one unifying aesthetic or content that says this work is Asian American.”
Acknowledging a multiplicity of expression is the first step toward getting audiences to release outmoded stereotypes and to see this art on its own merits. “We have to get people comfortable with these artists, not feeling the need to think of them as unusual or exotic or strange,” says Min. “We need to get the art world to start looking at them through other lenses, like theme and form. Or, God forbid, why not talk about all three things simultaneously? Content and form and identity?”
And that, perhaps, is ultimately the point of this exhibition. Even though it contains a myriad of voices and ideas, it, too, is just a single depiction of the Asian American arts landscape, one lens through which to view this community’s startling creativity and ripening brilliance. There are — or should be — many others. Like the lyrics of the Blondie song that gives the exhibition its name, these artists will win you over, with the beauty of their work, the depth of their thinking, the unexpected facets they show of their characters. They’ll get you. They’ll find you. One way, or another.