Fresh Talk Daring Gazes, Conversations on Asian American Art

Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes chronicles the blossoming of Asian American art and anticipates the growing democratization of American art and culture. Pairing work by twenty-four contemporary Asian American visual artists with responses provocatively drawn from cultural critics, other artists, activists, and intellectuals, this book explores themes of geographical movement, the sexuality of Asian bodies, colonization, miscegenation, hybrid forms of immigrant cultures, the loss of home, war, history, and memory. As a set of dialogues, simultaneously visual and textual, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes encourages the cross-cultural conversation that is shaping the emerging art of Asian Americans and of the United States in general. Alternately personal, intellectual, aesthetic, and political, these essays and the art they consider provide unique perspectives on both the past and the future of American art. (Publisher's summary)

Jacket and book design: Nicole Hayward. Jacket illustration: Martin Wong, Kato, 1992, acrylic on linen, 48¼ in. diamter. Collection of Jayson Edlin. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and PPOW, New York..