January 20–March 31, 2007

One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now features new paintings, sculptures, installations and video works by seventeen emerging Asian American artists born in the late 1960s and 1970s, including Michael Arcega, Xavier Cha, Patty Chang, Binh Danh, Mari Eastman, Ala Ebtekar, Chitra Ganesh, Glenn Kaino, Geraldine Lau, Jiha Moon, Laurel Nakadate, Kaz Oshiro, Anna Sew Hoy, Jean Shin, Indigo Som, Mika Tajima, and Saira Wasim. The title is drawn from a 1978 Blondie hit. While it is indicative of the visible influence of popular culture on these artists’ work, it also hints at the cultural duality informing each artist’s existence and the degree to which this duality may or may not inform their practice.

One Way or Another concentrates on artists whose home, permanent or temporary, is here in the United States. This exhibition seeks to expand the notion of what it means to be Asian American in the twenty-first century. Post-1965 immigration and increased globalization have complicated the constituency called Asian American. The term now comprises not only immigrants born elsewhere or those born here, but also those who are able to travel back and forth in an ever-expanding, dynamic Asian diaspora. Many of the participating artists live in or are otherwise firmly based in Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Aside from being major arts centers, these regions are also significant population centers of Asian Americans with the attendant resources serving those diverse communities.

In contrast to Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, the 1996 exhibition organized by Asia Society and also presented at Blaffer Gallery, which showed artists wrestling with their immigrant experience, One Way or Another focuses on new work by artists who are firmly rooted in the United States.

The exhibition presents a fresh generation of Asian American artists who have highly divergent points of view and who use a startling array of practices and media to address a new generational sense of identity. Together, they define a particular moment in the American cultural landscape and suggest entirely new meanings for the ‘Asian American’ experience.

Michael Arcega deftly interprets current environmental and political events through parody, visual puns, and double entendre. Eternal Salivation (2006) summarizes Arcega’s reflections on the disastrous geological, economic and political aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The large hand-constructed ship is held aloft by a pedestal of crates, its interior lined by rows of dried meats that hang just out of reach of the viewer, and with them survival: salivation instead of salvation. The dark humor and disturbing beauty of this work is characteristic for Arcega’s ongoing investigation into how the striving for economic or political power fails to prevent, or even worse, precipitates natural disaster, cultural conflict and religious warfare. Arcega was born in 1973 in Manila, The Philippines; he lives and works in San Francisco, California.

For Holiday Cruise (2006) Xavier Cha took on the guise of three invented personae–Cornucopia, Cornrow Hairbraid and Polyhedra–whom she took turns enacting in a gallery context, where the embodied characters became the artwork on display. At the same time she allowed a broad spectrum of performers, including opera singers, strippers, astrologists, and fashion designers to use the gallery space for their own purposes during the course of her exhibition. Invited to interact and interrupt her performance at random while being filmed as part of the exhibition, Cha’s guests underwent the same confusion as the artist herself, at times artist, at times audience, and, as the piece enters the distribution channels of the art world and this exhibition: art work. Cha was born in 1980 in Los Angeles, California; she lives and works in New York, New York.

Patty Chang’s body-based video works are often both comedic and disturbing, treading a line between fiction and reality. A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West is a translation of the magazine article written by Walter Benjamin about Anna May Wong, whom he met at a party in Berlin. His language is ornamental, poetic, and peppered with Chinese quotations, as if to situate her in an appropriate setting. In the rereading of the article in a space that resembles a film set, wavering back and forth between the exotic and the banal, there is confusion about his tone and awkwardness to the process of interpretation. This work is a study for a longer project about Anna May Wong, translation, and transculturation at the advent of sound film. Chang was born in 1972 in San Francisco, California; she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Binh Danh’s works explore the notion of making evident an invisible but fundamentally extant history. His piece, Dead (2006), is based on images from the June 27, 1969 issue of Life Magazine entitled “The Faces of American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Images of the fallen soldiers have been photosynthetically imprinted on leaves freshly cut from their source, then strung with fishnet to create a sculptural piece resembling a series of vines. Deeply resonant with current images of the dead from Iraq, the piece underscores how little we learn from history. Separated by forty years, the young men in these images could easily be the ones in the newspapers today. Dahn was born in 1977 in Kien Gang, Vietnam; he lives and works in San Jose, California.

Working from imagination and from magazines, dollar store calendars, newspapers, and Time-Life books, Mari Eastman’s paintings and drawings are firmly based in the all-inclusive mediated world of images surrounding us on a daily basis. She uses airbrush, acrylic, and oil paints to render everything from beautifully hazy landscapes, Asian antiquities, animals, and luxurious interiors, to Native American portraits, early American landscapes and, more recently, war scenes. While she indulges in the sheer pleasure of beauty and celebrates the often mundane ways in which we incorporate aesthetic pleasure into our lives, she also notes the darker side of much of this pleasure. Eastman’s signature use of glitter imbues her works with a sense of magic–glitter as fairy dust–and kitsch, but also points to the gap between an imagined ideal and reality. Eastman was born in 1970 in Berkeley California; she lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Ala Ebtekar installation Elemental (2004) draws attention to parallels between the slowly dying tradition of Iranian Coffeehouse painting, wall hangings or paintings based on The Book of Kings, and the hip-hop and graffiti cultures established in the United States. During his studies Ebtekar discovered striking similarities between those traditions, both blending narration and rhythm with visual and physical expression. Elemental was conceived as a synthesizing dream locale in which whitewashed coffeehouse paintings and photographs of wrestlers, traditional coffeehouse seating, and hookahs coexist with boom boxes covered with Persian floral motifs, embroidered track jackets, and beaded Adidas with flat-laces made form Iranian ribbons. Ebtekar was born in 1978 in Berkeley, California, where he still lives and works.

Chitra Ganesh’s mural work combines drawing, assemblage, and washes of color to create fantastical scenes of re-imagined texts. Drawing upon tales of creation and moral struggle from Hindu, Indian, and Greek mythology, as well as from poetic and current event sources, Ganesh identifies overlooked narratives within the mainstream telling of events. Her monumental installations examine language as a cultural condition by re-envisioning events and stories of both past and present. Brightly colored plastics, textured clothes, and cheap metallic props co-exist with the painted icons form myth and history, thus binding the monumentality of text to the everyday existence of her viewers. Ganesh was born in 1975 in Brooklyn, New York, where she still lives and works.)

In his sculptural works, Glenn Kaino considers possibilities of unexpected formal changes and disguised conceptual detours in objects which may, at first glance, appear familiar. Graft (2006), consists of a pair of taxidermic animals–a pig and a salmon, displayed in glass exhibition cases, whose respective epidermis have been swapped with those of a cow and a shark. Graft was inspired by reality TV “make-overs,” plastic surgery, diet, and “personality coaching,” and while it touches upon the problematic notion of race in its formal concern with species and skin, it also serves more broadly as a metaphor for the difficulty of locating social identity and the troubled place science and evolution take in the landscape of social ideologies. Kaino was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, California, where he still loves and works.

Geraldine Lau’s topographies made of machine-cut vinyl and mounted on the walls like signage are based on existing maps, but altered to retrieve what is usually lost in the process of cartography. Lau reveals the inaccuracies of mapmaking that are often accepted as truth and deployed as instruments of political power and then takes it a step further still by plotting evolution and fiction. With an emphasis on projecting spatial growth and development of cities around transportation and distribution needs, she intends for her maps to be read as narrative rather than didactic. Embracing contradictions of reality and fiction, past and present, Lau’s maps exist as sites of collective memory. Lau was born in 1970 in Singapore; she lives and works in New York, New York.

Masterfully balancing a mélange of styles and art-historical references, Jiha Moon’s paintings offer a complex mix of both conflicting cultures and cultural hybridity. Confronting the ongoing clashes between Asia and America, past and present, nature and culture, Moon’s work reflects a wide range of influences from highly abstract works by Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) artist Shitao to fifteenth century Northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch, and Choson dynasty artist Sin Sa-im-dang’s to American Outsider artist Henry Darger. By balancing artistic control and abandonment, she pushes the boundaries between abstract and representational imagery, forging brave new worlds with each composition. Moon was born 1973 in Taegu, Korea; she lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Laurel Nakadate meets strangers on the street, goes home with them, and makes videos. These chance encounters turn into video stories that are a hybrid of documentary photography, pop culture, and a constructed narrative the artists creates with her newly found partners just minutes before they shoot. She seeks out men who are single and childless, who don’t have women in their lives and draws them into the foreign territory of a virtual relationships driven by girlish desires and actions. The artificiality and awkwardness of these encounters creates a world of uneasy fantasy charged with voyeurism and exhibitionism, loneliness and longing, wishing and watching, fear and cunning, slapstick and folly. Nakadate was born in 1975 in Austin, Texas; she lives and works in New York, New York.

With meticulous craftsmanship Kaz Oshiro stretches the conventional medium of painting on both a literal and conceptual level. The result is a three-dimensional trompe-l’oeil of prosaic items such as refrigerators, washing machines, and microwave ovens. These works realistically represent mass-produced commodities, and through their modular forms, simulate Minimalist art. The dead-pan geometry of Oshiro’s objects is unsettled by fabricated traces of stickers of post-punk avant-garde bands such a Sonic Youth, or of spilled detergent by way of Jackson Pollock that turn these seemingly run-of-the mill objects into indexes of their imagined owners. It is in the viewer’s confusion over use and functionality that Oshiro locates the transformative quality of his work. Oshiro was born in 1967 in Okinawa, Japan; he lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Anna Sew Hoy’s work revolves around two central themes: the sense of a holistic relationship between the natural and the artificial and deployment of Asian traditions and tropes in tandem with strategies common in modern and contemporary art. Taking her cues from ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangements, she creates arresting assemblages of found elements often composed in relation to the space in which they are shown. Hoy’s use of the readymade is also fueled by the Chinese idea of the scholar’s rock, which deems the natural beauty of certain unusually shaped stones worthy of their consideration as art objects. Stretching across boundaries, and art historical and cultural references in her sampling of practices, Hoy offers a highly original variation on the popular thread of installation art. Hoy was born in 1976 in Auckland, New Zealand; she lives and works in New York, New York.

Jean Shin’s large-scale installations of small, discarded materials collected from people, places, and communities suggest themes of commonality and difference. For Unraveling Shin collected used knit sweaters from people who consider themselves a part of the Asian American arts community. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972), she unraveled the sweaters and used the loosened yarn to create a tangible map of this self-defined community that reads as a reflection on the connections and the web of relationships between its participants from New York to Houston, to San Francisco and Los Angeles.Shin was born in 1971 in Seoul, Korea; she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Indigo Som is largely concerned with Issues of identity and authenticity. However, instead of searching for an essential origin or original, she explores heterogeneous existences in America that often come dressed up in poetic or humorous attire. The series Mostly Mississippi: Chinese Restaurants of the South (2004-2005) is a collection of exterior views of restaurant that typically serve Americanized Chinese dishes to clientele in racially divided rural towns in the South. As part of the scenic cliché, these roadside eateries would usually not catch our attention, but under Som’s empathetic gaze they emerge as the psychic residue of “Chinese-ness” deeply embedded in the quotidian American landscape. Som was born in 1966 in San Francisco, California; she lives and works in Berkeley, California.

Mika Tajima’s investigates the social function of formalist traditions and its possibilities through alteration. For Extruded Plaid (Suicidal Desires) (2006), Tajima stripped a plaid pattern to its formal elements and translates the two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional, architectural space, which is also used as a site for her performance. The notion of destabilizing our understanding of installation as a sculptural work of art is literally amplified by Tajima’s decision to perform remixes of pre-recorded samples–which she sees as the audio equivalent of found objects–by Minimalist composers and musicians as an accompaniment to the work. The use of mirrors in the installation furthers this sense of reflection, refraction, and repetition–each to be experienced interchangeably as sound, vision, and metaphor. Tajima was born in 1975 in Los Angeles, California; she lives and works in New York, New York.

Pakistani-born Saira Wasim uses a contemporary form of miniature painting to explore social and political issues that divide the modern world. The series Battle for Hearts and Minds illustrates the clash between imperialism in the west and fundamentalism in the east and questions the underlying motivation and uneasy alliance that keeps this conflict going. Set in a puppet theatre, The New World Order portrays the staged friendship between the United States, Britain, and their allies in the Muslim world as a show that is produced, written and directed by Western media. An overt statement against ignorance and prejudice, Wasim’s works plea for social justice, respect, and tolerance through the use of caricature and satire. Wasim was born in 1975 in Lahore, Pakistan; she lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now is curated by a national, three-person team: Susette S. Min, former curator at the Drawing Center in New York and now Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies and Art History at University of California, Davis; Karin Higa, Senior Curator of Art, Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles; and Melissa Chiu, Director of the Museum and Curator of Contemporary Asian Art, Asia Society.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 128-page catalogue distributed by Yale University Press, with commissioned essays by leading authorities in the field demonstrating the new artistic approaches of this generation of artists. Short entries on each artist including biographies and discussions of their work are also included.

One Way or Another is made possible with support from Altria Group, Inc. Additional support provided by the W.L.S Spencer Foundation, Nimoy Foundation and Asia Society’s Contemporary Art Council.

The Brown Bag Gallery Tour and Contemporary Salon are presented in collaboration with Asia Society Texas.