Remapping Asian and Asian Diasporic Art: Identity, Intervention, and Care

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Remapping Asian and Asian Diasporic Art: Identity, Intervention, and Care Chang Tan (bio), Laura Kina (bio), and Tina Chen (bio) for the better part of the twentieth century, the exhibition and interpretation of Asian and Asian diasporic art in the United States have centered on the issue of identity. While such a focus helped raise the visibility of many marginalized artists and, since the 1960s, facilitated mobilization within and beyond communities, it also perpetuated stereotypes and constrained how these artists and their work were interpreted. Artists of Asian ancestry are often shackled by the demand for “authenticity”— a racially inflected concept that prevents them from full recognition or colors their acceptance in the nominally avant-garde and universal but in fact Eurocentric discourse of modern art. Seeing the limits of the framework of institutionalized multiculturalism in the 1990s, the late critic Alice Yang cautioned that “exhibitions that focus exclusively on race obscure the divergent and contradictory ways in which race itself and its attendant politics are positioned relative to other concerns and strategies” (Yang 1998, 97– 98). This special issue, conceived in 2019, was meant to build on the work of an increasing number of scholars and curators who question the limits of such “identity politics” in Asian and Asian diasporic art in the twenty- first century and seek to contextualize issues of race as intersecting with nationality, sexuality, gender, religion, and class (Chiu, Higa, and Min 2006; Machida 2008; Lee 2010; Min 2018). In our original call for papers, we asked, How does Asian and Asian diasporic art position itself in global, local, and transnational contexts in a post–identity politics age, when the concept of “Asian- ness” has been questioned and deconstructed? How do art practices, exhibitions, and the academic discipline of art history allow us to visualize “Asias” anew as a multitude brought together by what [End Page vi] individuals choose to do, instead of by what they are? How might shifting attention from identity to enactment underscore what Asian and Asian diasporic art stands for and change how this art has been understood? We invited artists, curators, and scholars to examine and engage the flows, convergences, alliances, borders, and resistances of Asian and Asian diasporic art in terms of intervention, which we approached bidirectionally. Drawing on an outward- facing definition of the term, we asked potential contributors to consider theorizing the agency of artworks and projects in the world beyond art institutions, questioning the ways art tackles the entropic and the quotidian of its specific locality and exploring how artists, as individuals and as collectives, create bonds and negotiate conflicts with communities. Concomitantly, we were also interested in the inward possibilities of intervention, asking contributors to consider how Asian and Asian diasporic art intervenes in the discipline of art history as well as contemporary art practices, instead of merely adding new territory to the existing map of world art. The tumultuous events of the past two years, however, have compelled us to reexamine our original premises and agendas. The scale and urgency of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, accompanied by rising cases of anti- Asian racism across the Euro- American world, make it abundantly clear that racial and ethnic identities still matter a great deal and that recognizing such (concocted and often slippery) identities can lead to both violence and empowerment. Additionally, the global pandemic sharpened our sense of connectedness: planetary, interspecies, omnipresent, yet also troubled and fragile. In this intimately connected yet contentious world, to form identities and to assert agency require more scrutiny, nuance, and care, for artists and for the institutions and infrastructures in which they are situated. These insights have helped guide us in the process of cultivating and evaluating scholarship for this issue. As part of Verge’s long- standing commitment to mentorship and public scholarship, we convened two panels and hosted the 2020 Pennsylvania State University (PSU) Global Asias Summer Institute to further develop the critical possibilities of this issue. For the 2021 College Art Association conference, Laura Kina and Chang Tan organized a Verge- sponsored panel, “Asian American Art, Activism, and Intervention,” that brought together artists, curators, and scholars to consider the intersections and interventions of art and...