Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms

Asian American Contemporary Artists in California

Laura Fantone

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137506702
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers gendered, postcolonial insights into the poetic and artistic work of four generations of female Asian American artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nancy Hom, Betty Kano, Flo Oy Wong, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Theresa H.K. Cha, and Hung Liu are discussed in relation to the cultural politics of their time, and their art is examined in light of the question of what it means to be an Asian American artist. Laura Fantone's exploration of this dynamic, understudied artistic community begets a sensitive and timely reflection on the state of Asian American women in the USA and in Californian cultural institutions.

© The Author(s) 2018

Laura FantoneLocal Invisibility, Postcolonial FeminismsCritical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Visuality, Gender and Asian America

Laura Fantone¹

(1)

Gender and Women’s Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

The persistent questioning of the insider’s and the outsider’s position in terms of cultural politics is yet another way to work at the difficult edge between these movements—inside out and outside in.

—Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Digital Film Event, p. 193

End Abstract

In 2005, I met Trinh T. Minh-ha in Naples and there I saw her films for the first time. She presented The Fourth Dimension, as an experiment in deconstructing Japan and exploring frames in digital art (2001). At the time I was writing about colonialism, neo-orientalism and Japanese characters in video games. Her visual work and writings shifted my trajectory towards Asian Americanness, visuality, women artists and alterity. The only other East Asian visual artists I had in mind at that time were Yoko Ono and Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha—artists associated with highly experimental work, centered around gender, otherness and visuality. The encounter with Trinh T. Minh-ha changed my perspectives in deep ways, and some of the intellectual and spiritual pathways where it took me are still unfolding today.

In 2007 I traveled to Berkeley to see a show at BAM-PFA (Berkeley Art Museum) titled One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now. The occasion was perfect for me because I had just started pursuing my research interest in Asian American art, and the show’s curatorial statement promised “a challenge to extend the category of Asian American art”:

There can be no such thing as a collective definition of the constituency called Asian America, … but the show was born from the desire to evaluate an Asian American sense of self, an individualism that comprises an Asian American cultural imagination. (One Way or Another brochure, 2007)

Curators Melissa Chu, Karin Higa and Susette Min surprised me in their oscillation between using a collective, demographic category (Asian American) and, at the same time, emphasizing the self and individuality within it and thus denying its validity as a ground for a commonality, an artistic style, or a shared set of concerns and foci in Asian American artists’ work. Theirs was a question coming from the inside, serving as a response to the perception of art on the outside.

I wondered then how one was to define Asian American art. Is it art made by people who live in the USA but are of Asian origins? Is it art that reflects subjects and aesthetic styles or techniques typical of specific Asian visual art traditions? Is it art that reflects the unique concerns, topics and styles emerging from the experience of being part of the Asian diaspora in the USA (Machida 2008, p. 29)? Many insides and outsides are at play in the posing of such questions.

If there was no consensus on the definition of Asian American art among the experts, then my initial research project was pointless. In that moment I realized that my research would have to be an interrogation of the history and meaning of Asian American art as an evolving, contested cultural formation. As of now, after years of research and writing, those same questions on Asian American art remain unsettled, even among scholars and art historians specializing in Asian America—notably, Machida, Chang and Johnson, Higa, Kim and Mizota—all of whom recognize the increased internal diversity of Asian American communities dueto the basic demographic growth of such groups across the USA, as well as the vast differences among cultures and countries of origin. These are some of the many outside factors shaping an externally imposed Asian Americanness, a collective space of artistic, cultural and demographic shifts and internal negotiations. The complicated question that remains on the table is, how do demographics and cultural diversity influence style, subjects and the foci of Asian American artists? Why, when, and to what purposes do artists chose to identify with such a cultural or demographic label, both in the past and today? Is it to claim visibility? To search for belonging in the larger, diverse mix of American ethnicities and cultures? These are the background questions to my investigation.

Margo Machida, an incredibly talented art historian, ended her seminal book Unsettled Visions (2008) by stating that Asian American art is deeply shaped by a poetics of positionality. In surveying most of the Asian American artists emerging in the 1990s, she pointed out that it was impossible not to examine three reemerging themes: othering (identity and difference), social memory and trauma, and migration and relationship to place. Machida sees a continuity across generations of Asian American artists and, while registering important aesthetic and subject-choice differences, she maintains a position based on an imagined connection ever enriched by heterogeneity. Machida develops the idea of “communities of cultural imagination” in describing contemporary Asian American art as moving away from the opposing traps of either embracing one’s identity while policing its boundaries or self-erasing. She “recognizes that cultural imagination is a communicative (and community) field in which the individual and the collective flow back and forth, a field where human consciousness (and creativity) is an active agent of innovation of the social imaginary” (Machida 2008, p. 278). I use Machida’s conceptual guide to analyze contemporary art as a complex field full of tensions, yet still a shared ground. She does not theorize a rupture among contemporary Asian American artists, because ultimately her political goal is to promote a conception of the Asian American art community as a plurality or, as she puts it, “communities of cultural imagination,” using art to give a heterogeneous group the power of cultural, collective imagination (Machida 2008, p. 14).

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Karin Higa, in her 2002 survey of Asian American women artists in California, entitled “What is an American Woman Artist?” (in Art/Women/California, 1950–2000 2002), claims that there are no connecting elements today to justify such a category, even as she proceeds to describe the work of five major artists of the twentieth century. Surprised again by this simultaneous negation and affirmation, I followed Higa’s writing, noticing how she honors the relevance of the Asian American movement as the origin moment without which the cultural and artistic production called “Asian American” would not be recognized today. Higa also justifies the need to look at gender within that category, given women’s double exclusion from feminist Eurocentrism and from Asian American men’s oppression.

Superficially, this may seem a simplistic criterion based on an intersection of oppressions, justifying the search for the most oppressed subject, the subaltern who can speak, and for whom, magically, the researcher-translator will provide articulation of her oppression. I remained fascinated by that oscillation between the present need to claim an identity and the simultaneous recognition of diversity within it, as if the label, while used, has become stifling and stale. As a feminist, postcolonial scholar interested in social movements, I find this oscillation interesting to explore in comparison with the debates in transnational feminism concerning the use of terms “queer,” “gay” or “feminist” as accepted and rejected by younger generations or by non-American LGBTQI* communities.

As I was immersing myself in the literature on Asian American Women, I was exposed to a new set of ideas and genealogical questions on Asian American art. In Fall 2008, I saw Asian American Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970 at the San Francisco de Young Museum, curated by Mark Johnson and Daniel Cornell. Chinese American historian Gordon Chang, art professor ShiPu Wang, and curator Karin Higa, wrote introductory texts that gave a comprehensive set of views on the contribution of artists born in the first half of the twentieth century, mostly in Asia, who resided in the USA. Many prominent names, such as Yayoi Kusama, Yun Gee, Isamu Noguchi, Chiura Obata, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik were featured in the show. From a feminist perspective, it featured few female artists; with only nine out of sixty artists being female, they were outsiders within the show. These artists were Miné Okubo, Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Shimizu Hibi (married to painter George Matsaburo Hibi), Bernice Bing, Tseng YuHo, Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi and Emiko Nakano, all of them connected to California. All the Japanese American women had experienced internment.

I mention the show here because it was explicitly connecting Asian American history with questions of representation, modernity and high art. The show was defined by Higa as “the first comprehensive show that examines the historical presence of artists of Asian descent in American art […] explicitly filtered through questions of race, identity and notions of modernism” (Cornell and Johnson 2008, p. 15). This seems very much in the same vein as Higa’s commentary on the One Way or Another show, when Higa (together with Chu and Min) asks, rhetorically, what the politics of organizing a show around race could be, only to conclude its necessity in the name of recovering the past of marginalized communities in the United States (ibid., p. 17). The goal in each case is the validation of the present communities by way of historicization, thus making the past useful for the present. Higa demonstrates this in her language as well when she points out that the term “Asian-American,” as one, hyphenated word, is posthumous to most of the works and artists featured, and so the title of the show keeps separate the terms “Asian,” “American” and “Modern.”

Reading Higa’s and ShiPu Wang’s insights led me to connect the questions of modernity, modernism, primitivism and Eurocentrism in the visual arts raised by cultural critics and postcolonial scholars like Kobena Mercer, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Isaac Julien in the 1990s. These scholars address questions of the politics of art museums in the West and interrogate how the public spectacle of art plays a part in excluding from modernity the colonial other, opening to current questions of cultural equity. With a Gramscian approach, I took great inspiration from the Asian American Modern Art show as a counter-hegemonic project on modernism, cultural hybridity, and parallel and divergent modernities (to use a term of James Clifford’s). I connect the materials presented in the show with the critical questions posed by Kobena Mercer in his book Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), part of the related MIT series of volumes, Annotating Art Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Art (2004–2007). Mercer registered the 1990s growth of attention in the art world to non-Western artists and those with minority backgrounds in the West, partly due, he argued, to the rising generation of curators and critics of non-Western or minority backgrounds whose agenda involved a project of inclusion and diversity. Mercer asked questions that became crucial to my own project: Why does the contemporary so often take precedence over the historical as the privileged focus for examining matters of difference and identity? Does the heightened visibility of Black and minority artists in private galleries and public museums really mean that the historical problem of invisibility is now solved? To what extent has the curating of non-Western materials in blockbuster exhibitions led to displays that may actually obscure the fine art traditions of countries that experienced colonialism? Has the very idea of inclusion now become a double-edged sword? Could the “cosmopolitan” serve as a conceptual tool capable of cutting through the congested, confusing condition created by competing vocabularies—terms such as the “global,” the “international,” the “cross-cultural” and the “culturally diverse” (Mercer 2005, p. 9)? Mercer’s pointing at modernism and its underplayed cross-cultural past becomes helpful in exploring the contemporary in terms of a multiplicity of time and diverse influences. His questions continue to guide me in fundamental ways throughout this project, expanding from classic texts like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), Franz Fanon’s Black Skins White Masks (2008/1952), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other (1989), Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) and the journal Third Text, edited by Rasheed Areen.

The other fundamental text that inspired this work is Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes, Conversations on Asian American Art, published in 2003 and edited by Margo Machida, Elaine Kim and Sharon Mizota. Machida, in her preface to the volume, defends the project of collectively writing about Asian American artists in a context where identity is seen as rigid and essentialist. She warns against the conflation of attention to the cultural specificity of minorities and cultural nationalism. She also evokes the need to embrace cross-ethnic communications on the parallels and contrasts between Asian, Latino and African American artists—a need that has not yet been met today.

In the same volume, the key essay that deeply shaped the trajectory of my research was “Interstitial Subjects: Asian American Visual Art as a Site for New Cultural Conversations” by Kim et al. (2003, p. 1). In fifty pages, Kim traces all the historical evolution of Asian American art since the first photography studio in the 1850s’ Chinatowns. She argues for Asian American art’s distinctive and unique Americanness, criticizing the art historian’s desire to identify Asian art elements in the work of Asian American artists as the only element that would authenticate them as such. Most importantly, Kim develops a long section about the lesser-known artists of the 1970s who played a crucial role in starting Asian American cultural productions—written, visual and aural—often choosing the political form of the collective. Kim’s focus here emphasizes the historical and political aspects of art: the 1960s and 1970s’ openness to the streets, the public space, the crowds protesting the Vietnam War, racial segregation, and police brutality. She makes apparent the importance of the Asian American movement and its interconnections with Black and Brown coalitions and liberation movements as well as the new kinds of freely accessible art created in the streets: murals and experimental printed materials such as zines, posters and flyers. The collective impetus of that time still resonates strongly and in my preliminary research I discovered quite a few texts devoted to that period, written by Asian American participants. As much as I liked the period, I felt that its chorality would have been hard for me to study as a total outsider, separate in time, space and identity from that movement and moment. I listened to the female voices of women like Nancy Hom, Nellie Wong, Genny Lim and Janice Mirikitani; read their poems, and appreciated their addressing of women’s multiple roles, their activist messages, and, equally of importance, their silences. Their political side came first, always the most visible priority, and then slowly came the discovery of the inside, the personal, marked by gender and ethnicity: the painful silences of exile and uprootedness.

“Interstitial Subjects” also gives an interesting reading of the 1990s’ increased attention to Asian American art, offering an enlightening point on how public museums were in a budgetary crisis when they started to court Asian American communities for financial support (2003, p. 18). The politics of guilt, following the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, also brought sudden visibility to the Korean artists in California. Kim’s sociopolitical reading of the ups and downs of institutional interest in Asian American art led me to analyze San Francisco museums’ cultural policies with a critical lens, looking at processes of circulation and commodification of Asianness. Kim articulates her critique in connection with Latino and Black cultural critics (Coco Fusco, Isaac Julien, Faith Ringgold and Guillermo Gomez-Peña), denouncing the disconnect between heightened cultural v...