Holding Space: A Shortlist Exploring the Complexity of Asian American Identity Part 1

Publications that address the complexities of the Asian American and Asian diasporic experience in the field of contemporary art are few and far between.

This dearth results from various and entangled political, racial, economic, and social factors, including the underrepresentation of Asian American artists, the lack of funding for Asian American scholarship, and institutional biases.

Centering his analysis in the dynamic forces of modern East Asian history, Kuan-Hsing Chen contends that decolonization, deimperialization, and an intellectual undoing of the cold war must proceed simultaneously. 

Combining postcolonial studies, globalization studies, and the emerging field of “Asian studies in Asia,” Chen insists that those on both sides of the imperial divide must assess the conduct, motives, and consequences of imperial histories. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized and circulated by The Asia Society Galleries and guest-curated by Margo Machida, this volume features three essays and documentation on twenty artists and fifty artworks.

As one of the first books on the subject, Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art makes a major contribution to the literature on an increasingly important aspect of contemporary American art. (Book jacket excerpt)

Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is the first comprehensive study of the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian ancestry active in the United States before 1970.

The publication features original essays by 10 leading scholars, biographies of more than 150 artists, and over 400 reproductions of artwork, ephemera, and images of the artists. (Book jacket)

This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experience of Asian American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. 

The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model minority myth. (Book jacket excerpt)

Anuradha Vikram’s Decolonizing Culture is a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces. 

Originally published between 2013 & 2017 through Daily Serving’s #Hashtags column, Vikram's text considers the specifics of equality and representation in the context of current events in the field of arts and culture in the U.S. & internationally. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

In Disaffected, Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America.

By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism & white fragility. (Publisher's summary excerpt)

Chang investigates “Asian American Art” through the formation, membership, and artwork of three important post-90s artist collectives: Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, Godzookie, and the Barnstormers.

Envisioning Diaspora peers into the nuances of artist collective formations and communities of affinity, and ultimately the core issues of identity politics, aesthetics, and diaspora involved in Asian American Art. (Publisher's summary excerpt)

Pairing work by 24 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. These essays and the art they consider provide unique perspectives on both the past and future of American art. (Publisher's summary excerpt)

This limited-edition print portfolio was produced by Godzilla: Asian American Art Network in 1999 and features 46 signed works by 48 artists. The portfolio was designed to complement the collective’s installation “From Basement to Godzilla,” ...

as part of the Urban Encounters exhibition at the New Museum, in which Godzilla paid tribute to Basement Workshop, a grassroots artist-activist group founded in 1970 and one of the formative predecessors to Godzilla. (Publisher's summary excerpt)

Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 is a comprehensive anthology of writings, art projects, publications, correspondence, organizational documents, and other archival ephemera from the trailblazing Asian artist collective. 

Edited by curator Howie Chen, this publication includes full essays and contextual material detailing the critical genealogies embodied by the group as well as its wide-ranging activities. (Publisher's summary excerpt)

In Immigrant Acts, Lowe argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant—at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation—

displaces the temporality of assimilation. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. (Publisher's summary excerpt)

Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, ...

to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth. (Publisher's summary excerpt)

This book focuses on works by 17 Asian American artists born in the late 60s & 70s to explore this pivotal generation of artists, the prevalent themes in their art and the different ways they configure identity in their work.

It features art and includes essays that discuss the shifting meaning of Asian America over the last decade and address the issues of mixed heritage & the emergence of an evolving Asian American identity in an increasingly globalized society. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

Focusing on the cultural and philosophic conflation between the "oriental" and the "ornamental," Ornamentalism offers an original and sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. This study pushes our vocabulary about the woman of color past the usual ...

platitudes about objectification and past the critique of Orientalism in order to formulate a fresher and sharper understanding of the representation, circulation, and ontology of Asiatic femininity. (Publisher's summary excerpt)