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On the Dilemmas of Artistic (Con)Fusion: Music
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One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
What does Asian American art look like? One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, an exhibition put on by Asia Society at UC Berkeley's Museum of Art, playfully and powerfully answers: "Anything we want it to be."
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One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
What does Asian American art look like? One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, an exhibition put on by Asia Society at UC Berkeley's Museum of Art, playfully and powerfully answers: "Anything we want it to be."
One Way or Another is about multiplicity. The diverse range of art and even more diverse range of Asian American ethnicities announce multiple ways of seeing as well as being Asian/American/artists. The artists included in the exhibition may or may not deal with their issues of identity. The inclusion of identity art and art that deals with other issues is a revision of Asia Society's 1994 exhibition Asia/America that was criticized as too narrowly focused on identity politics. Since the current exhibition is subtitled Asian American Art Now, we are invited to look for "Asian American-ness" in the works, but there is no guarantee that we will find it. There is nothing that holds the artworks together as a group other than the ethnic label "Asian American." The exhibition uses ethnic categorization in order to question its validity.
In the first room, we are greeted with a giant shrimp bumping and grinding in the street, in front of a Los Angeles sushi restaurant. Xavier Cha, the artist herself, is wearing the shrimp costume for her Human Advertisement (2004) video performance. Next to this public display of absurdity are Binh Danh's photographs of Vietnam soldiers transferred onto flattened, trampled grass. The memorial-like faded portraits of Vietnam soldiers sets a completely different mood than the dancing shrimp. One of these things is not like the other, and yet they share the same wall. The juxtaposition of these two works says, "This is Asian American Art Now," silly and serious, pop cultural and historical, incompatible and coexistent.
To say a little more on the dancing shrimp, the bulbous pink costume is pregnant, phallic, and hilarious. The front bulge starts bouncing up and down during Cha's pelvic thrusts, making every museum visitor laugh out loud, breaking the museum code of silence. As viewers of the video, we are in on the joke and can laugh at the people on the street who try to ignore Cha, trying to act as normal as possible. Cha turns the performance on the unassuming spectators by forcing them to act normal and pretend not to see her. The Human Advertisement series also features Cha in a fingernail costume sashaying in heels in front of a manicure salon, and a nude Cha swirling cloth inside a crystal ball in front a know-your-future tarot card business. Her trio of performances presents the body as advertising, but she's not doing the businesses any good. Instead, Cha interrupts the normal, daily lives of people who encounter her absurdity by chance.
Because One Way or Another claims to be organized around ethnicity, there is an inherent expectation to see art that deals with Asian American issues, whatever they may be, upon entering the museum. Jean Shin and Patty Chang fill that expectation.
Jean Shin's Unraveling (2007) is the piece that most directly engages with Asian American-ness, and this is partly because Shin was commissioned to create a new work for the exhibition. A colorful array of folded-over sweaters are mounted on the walls of two different rooms while unraveled thread crisscrosses back forth to connect the sweaters to each other. Shin collected the sweaters of the three curators, Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette S. Min, who in turn got more Asian American community activists to donate their sweaters to the project. Labels inside the collar of each sweater name their former owners. The large web of pulled threads is a metaphor for the Asian American network as something tangled, fragile and yet tenacious.
Patty Chang's video A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West (2006) articulates another aspect of Asian American issues: problematic representation on film. Chinoiserie intersperses footage of three different people translating a magazine article about Anna May Wong written by art theorist Walter Benjamin. Each reader finds the text incomprehensible because 1) it's in German, 2) it's by Walter Benjamin, and 3) it's Orientalist. One reader trips over the language and haltingly comes up with "Anna May Wong, the name sounds colorful…small letters like those in a cup of tea that open themselves up to like, a full moon flower." Chang captures the failure of translation to expose Benjamin's description of Anna May Wong as empty nonsense.
While Shin's sweaters and Chang's video are driven by Asian American issues, some works take a more subtle and oblique approach. Glenn Kaino and Ala Ebtekar imply racial consciousness as one way of interpreting their works.
A life-size pig and salmon inhabit two separate fiberglass cages in Glenn Kaino's Graft (2006). The taxidermy-as-sculpture riffs on the habit of natural history museums to display creepy stuffed animals. Look closer and there are stitches running across the salmon's body. Kaino has recreated the salmon in shark skin to present one animal made of two skins. Similarly, the pig's patchwork hide is a combination of pig and cow skins. These new creatures with the skins of two different species symbolize interracial mixing and bicultural hybridity, if one were to do racialized reading of Graft. Alternatively, the stitched-up animals are a mockery of plastic surgery culture. This is the idea that Kaino proposes. His artist's statement in the exhibition brochure "explains" Graft by quoting Nip/Tuck, the "disturbingly perfect" TV drama about two plastic surgeons.
Step into a whitewashed Iranian coffeehouse in Ala Ebtekar's Elemental (2004). The installation is complete with low benches, hookah pipes, and a record player adding conversational noise. Most of the coffeehouse is covered in white paint, including the furniture and the mythological paintings and wrestling photographs on the walls. What remains in color is the clothing, which is scattered about the room. There is a denim jacket with a bright yellow patch of Persian floral designs, track jackets with Persian embroidery, and several beaded pairs of Adidas with Iranian ribbons for laces. These colorful clothing items are also objects of cultural hybridity. Iranian culture and hip-hop culture merge in Elemental, but not on equal grounds, as the work suggests that traditional Iranian culture fades into muted whiteness.
And what about art by Asian Americans that has nothing to do with being Asian American?
Kaz Oshiro's Trash Bin #10 (2006) is a meticulous reproduction of the ordinary type of trash bin found at fast food restaurants. The work has been surreptitiously placed near an exit so that it looks even more like a public trash bin and less like an art object. Oshiro's plays a trompe l'oeil game with the materials of painting. Acrylic and stretched canvas are all Oshiro uses to make Trash Bin #10, Small Fridge #7 and Overhead Cabinet. He is glorifying mundane objects of mass production much like pop art's fetishization of commodities. Campbell's soup can, anyone? But unlike pop art's factory-like production, Oshiro handcrafts with care. At the same time, Oshiro pokes fun at minimalism. He uses the essential tools of canvas and pigment to transform minimalism's white cube into humble objects like mini fridges and trash bins. Perhaps, the so-called Small Fridge and Trash Bin are art because Oshiro has rendered them non-functional and useless. One thing is for certain, cultural identity is irrelevant in Oshiro's works.
Dancing shrimp, unraveled sweater, whitewashed hookah pipe. All of these things are not like each other. For contemporary Asian American artists, one way of making art is to deal with identity, but other ways are up for grabs. The must-see exhibition frees Asian American art from having to be Asian American art.
Date Posted: 12/14/2007