DAAN at the Annual College Art Association Conference 2021 (virtual)

Join us for the Diasporic Asian Art Network Business Meeting and Panel during College Art Association this year. The Business Meeting is free to attend.

DAAN Business Meeting
February 11, 2021 at 12:30 PM EST
FREE to attend — RSVP to alexa.chang@rutgers.edu to get the Zoom link
Meet other members of DAAN and discuss projects that you are all working on. If you are interested in taking a leadership role in the network, please attend.

DAAN PANEL:

EcoArt: Grief, Healing, and Care in the time of our Enviro Crisis
Live Q&A online at Thursday, February 11, 2021 at 2:00-2:30PM

The panel itself will be available as a pre-recording on the CAA conference site: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2021/meetingapp.cgi/Session/7674

Transforming Consumer Waste Into Care and Urgency During the Enviro Crisis
Jean Shin, Pratt Institute

Mary Ting: On Art, Grief, Ecological Collapse into Action
Mary Ting, John Jay College

Grieving the Nonhuman: Sensorial Approaches to the Climate Crisis
Sue Huang, University of Connecticut

Moderated by Alexandra Chang, DAAN and Rutgers University-Newark

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Archive:

DAAN at CAA 2020 in Chicago

Join us for the Diasporic Asian Art Network events happening at the College Art Association 2020 conference in Chicago from February 13-15, 2020.

Location: Hilton Chicago, 720 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL

DAAN Affiliated Society Business Meeting:
Thursday, February 13, 2020
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor, Astoria Room
Come and meet members! We will discuss current projects and the upcoming panel for CAA 2021. Curators Fred Sasaki and Katherine Litwin will talk about the Jun Fujita: American Visionary exhibition that is at the Newberry Library. https://www.newberry.org/jun-fujita-american-visionary

DAAN Panel:
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Technologies of Drag: South Asians Queering American Art Through Craft and Design
6:00 – 7:30 p.m.
Hilton Chicago – 3rd Floor – Astoria Room
CHAIR
Anuradha Vikram, UCLA Department of Art
DISCUSSANTS
Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, San Francisco State University
Alpesh Kantilal Patel Florida International University
PRESENTATIONS
Hasan Elahi, George Mason University
R. Brendan Fernandes, Northwestern University

The panel highlights South Asian American artists who articulate current queer theory and critical race theory concepts through their contemporary art practices by applying craft and technology in reference to South and West Asian and North African (SWANA) and LGBTQI histories in the US. By looking at the work of contemporary artists of the South Asian diaspora working in the United States and Canada, I am interested in exploring how a visual/spatial/temporal rhetoric of the “glitch” – an artifact of lost or missing data – can function as a metaphor to organize strategies against this perennial erasure of our ethnic, cultural, and political identities. The artists and scholars who will present are mid-career practitioners working in the contemporary art strongholds of the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Florida, the New York tri-state area, and the DC-Maryland-Virginia metro area. They apply the premise of “technologies of drag” in a variety of ways: some more overtly LGBTQI in political and cultural reference, others using old and new technologies to create resistance and friction. Each produce work that thwarts gender and socioeconomic roles and expectations, racial barriers, and tensions between conditions of cultural production and museum collections that segregate artists and art.

ADVA Journal Release Celebration:
Friday, February 14
3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Hilton Chicago, Exhibitors’ Hall
Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, Booth Number: 612
Join the editors with a glass to celebrate the release of “Challenging Hegemony within the South Asian Diaspora,” the Fall 2019 issue of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) journal that is published by Brill in collaboration with the A/P/A Institute at NYU and Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University. Guest edited by artist and curator Jaishri Abichandani, Santhi Kavuri Bauer (San Francisco State University), and writer and educator Anuradha Vikram, the issue address the borderless and diasporic condition of South Asians around the globe in opposition to the statist and religious nationalism that drives political rhetoric in these countries of origin.

DAAN Dinner
Friday, February 14, after the ADVA journal special launch
Meet at Hilton Lobby in advance at 5:45 p.m. to walk over (10 min walk)
6:00 p.m. at Exchequer Restaurant & Pub
226 S Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL 60604
Self-pay
rsvp to: alexa.chang[at]rutgers.edu

Tour of the Newberry Library’s exhibition:
JUN FUJITA: AMERICAN VISIONARY
https://www.newberry.org/jun-fujita-american-visionary
Saturday, February 15,
2:00 p.m.
Location: Newberry Library, Trienens Galleries, 60 West Walton Street
Born outside of Hiroshima in 1888, Fujita came to Chicago in 1909, becoming the first Japanese American photojournalist. As an English-language tanka poet, he published regularly in Poetry during the 1920s; as a photographer, he captured many of the most infamous moments in Chicago history, including the Eastland Disaster, the 1919 race riots, and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

FLXST Contemporary Reception
2251 South Michigan Ave
Suite 220
Chicago, IL 60616
773-413-8030
Visit the new Chicago gallery FLXST Contemporary opened by Jan Bernabe in 2019. Exhibitions on view will include:
B-Side // Michael Weinberg: Corpus
Opening Reception: February 15, 2020, 5:30-8pm
February 15 – March 1, 2020

and A-Side // Yasmin Spiro: Edge of Time
Opening Reception: January 25, 2020, 5:30-8pm
January 25 – March 1, 2020

Join the Diasporic Asian Art Network Facebook Group and Page!

Please take a moment and join the Diasporic Asian Art Network Facebook Group and Page! This is where members can share information about their exhibitions, publications, news and opportunities with other members!

The DAAN Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/DAANetwork/

The NEW DAAN Facebook Group: (where you can share your news!!)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031380576910838/

DAAN at the 2019 College Art Association Conference February 13-16, 2019

Please find the upcoming Diasporic Asian Art Network [DAAN] events happening during the College Art Association 2019 week in Los Angeles from February 13-16, 2019. We hope that you can attend one or all of them!

Wednesday, February, 13, 2019

Diasporic Asian Art Network presents

Kusama-Infinity
Screening and Q&A with filmmaker Heather Lenz

Photo ©Harrie Verstappen

Hosted by the Museum of Modern Art
At the Museum of Modern Art Celeste Bartos Theater
4 West 54th Street
7:30pm

Free with RSVP for College Art Association conference participants and DAAN members only
RSVP to: myamamura3524@gmail.com

Now the top-selling female artist in the world, Yayoi Kusama overcame impossible odds to bring her radical artistic vision to the world stage. For decades, her work pushed boundaries that often alienated her from both her peers and those in power in the art world. Kusama was an underdog with everything stacked against her: the trauma of growing up in Japan during World War II, life in a dysfunctional family that discouraged her creative ambitions, sexism and racism in the art establishment, mental illness in a culture where that was particularly shameful and even continuing to pursue and be devoted to her art full time on the cusp of her 90s. In spite of it all, Kusama has endured and has created a legacy of artwork that spans the disciplines of painting, sculpture, installation art, performance art, poetry and literary fiction. After working as an artist for over six decades, people around the globe are experiencing her installation Infinity Mirrored Rooms in record numbers, as Kusama continues to create new work every day.

A screening of the film will be follow by a Q&A with the filmmaker Heather Lenz.

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Thursday, February 14, 2019

Annual Diasporic Asia Art Network [DAAN] business meeting

New York Hilton Midtown
4th Floor, Harlem Room
12:30pm-1:30pm

FREE for College Art Association conference participants

Join us for the annual Diasporic Asia Art Network [DAAN] business meeting at the College Art Association. DAAN is an affiliated society at CAA and has been meeting annually at the conference since 2009. Come to learn more about the network and to share your projects. DAAN’s institutional sponsor is the A/P/A Institute at NYU.

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Thursday, February 14, 2019

DAAN members are invited to join this event at the
A/P/A Institute at NYU exhibition table with DAAN members Laura Kina and Alexandra Chang

The Virtual Asian American Art Museum

at the College Art Association
New York Hilton Midtown
1335 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas)
A/P/A Institute at NYU Exhibit Booth Number 313, Rhinelander Gallery
3-5pm

FREE for College Art Association conference participants

The Virtual Asian American Art Museum (VAAAM) is a multi-year, inter-institutional digital humanities project initiated and led by the following major partners: the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, NYU Libraries, Getty Research Institute, Smithsonian Institution, DePaul University, Japanese American Service Committee, and TOME.

VAAAM also worked in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago for the museum’s inaugural regional module “Chicago-Midwest.” The scholarly content for the inaugural module was generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and through its initiative Art Design Chicago, an exploration of Chicago’s art and design history and legacy.

Rather than a “bricks and mortar” museum, VAAAM presents curated materials from US and international repositories to visualize, analyze, and contextualize Asian American art history. VAAAM facilitates the discussion of key topics emerging from the developing discourse of digital art history, American art, national and international standards for museum and institutional collection sharing, and digital access while fostering the transnational narrative of Asian American art. Learn more about the Virtual Asian American Art Museum and join us to celebrate its launch at College Art Association in New York.

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DAAN members are invited to attend this Special Issue celebration with the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal!

Friday, February 15, 2019

Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) Journal Spring 2019 Issue Celebration!

At College Art Association
New York Hilton Midtown
1335 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas)
A/P/A Institute at NYU Exhibit Booth Number 313, Rhinelander Gallery
3-5pm

Free for College Art Association conference participants

Join the editors of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) journal for a toast as they celebrate the latest ADVA journal Spring 2019 double issue “Expressions of Asian Caribbeanness” guest edited by Andil Gosine, Sean Metzger, and Patricia Mohammed. Learn more about ADVA journal and our current and future issues. ADVA journal is published by Brill and is a collaboration between A/P/A Institute at New York University and Concordia University’s Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

The Annual DAAN Dinner and a special visit to Oscar Oiwa Opening Reception for his solo show After Midnight

The Annual DAAN Dinner and special visit to Oscar Oiwa’s Opening Reception for After Midnight follows the ADVA journal celebration. Join members for a special visit to the solo show of artist Oscar Oiwa followed by an informal meal and conversation with members. The dinner is pay your own. Kindly RSVP to achang@nyu.edu so we can make reservations.

For those who wish to meet up at the Hilton, we will be meeting in the hotel front lobby and leave at 5:15pm to go downtown to Mizuma Kips & Wada Art at 324 Grand Street and arrive around 6pm, where we will meet the artist Oscar Oiwa and see his exhibition. We will travel from the exhibition to August Gatherings at 266 Canal Street at 7pm for dinner.

About the exhibition and artist:
After Midnight
a solo exhibition of paintings by artist Oscar Oiwa

Location: Mizuma Kips & Wada Art, 324 Grand Street, NYC

Sao Paulo-born Oiwa, primarily known for his galactic ink murals, is debuting a new collection of landscape paintings here at Mizuma Kips & Wada Art this February. Brimming with texture, color, and kaleidoscopic patterns, Oiwa’s pieces transport the viewer to an electric wonderland of improbable pictorial space, subverting long-entrenched expectations of surface and surreality in the process. Whether articulating how light bathes a forest floor or inviting us to consider the formal fluidity of the cosmos, Oiwa’s practice draws on far-ranging references like Pointillism and graphic design to create a new painterly lexis, a bold, fresh language for worlds at once familiar and bizarre. The larger works seem edgeless in their generosity, ensconcing the viewer in operatic gradients of color. Oiwa’s inspirations feel instinctively Modernist; his ability to harness emotional resonance through expertly deployed, immediate brushwork lends the paintings a mystical quality, further problematizing their positions as objects in the white cube. After Midnight offers a metaphysics of paint, a portal through which we can re-imagine the mundane as utterly miraculous.

Oscar Oiwa was born in Sao Paulo in 1965 to Japanese immigrants. He received his BFA from the School of Architecture and Urbanism in Sao Paolo in 1989 and has since had over 60 solo exhibitions at venues like the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art, the Takamatsu City Museum, and Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. His work is also featured in a number of international public collections, including the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, and the University of Sao Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art. He has received several awards, including Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the Asian Cultural Council Grant. Oiwa is currently based in New York City.

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Saturday, February 16, 2019

Diasporic Asian Art Network Panel at College Art Association:

Asian Diasporic Art and the Narrative of Modernism

At College Art Association
New York Hilton Midtown
1335 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas)
Rendezvous Trianon, 3rd Floor
10:30am-12pm

FREE for College Art Association conference participants

Chairs: SooJin Lee, Hongik University, South Korea
Midori Yamamura, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York

Presenters:

Recently Discovered Letters by Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Tom Wolf, Bard College

Asian American Artists from Hawai‘i in New York City: 1920-80
Margo L. Machida, University of Connecticut

Archives as Method: When the Artist Becomes the Art
SooJin Lee, Hongik University, South Korea

Discussant: Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University

 

DAAN at College Art Association 2018 in Los Angeles

Please find the upcoming Diasporic Asian Art Network [DAAN]  events happening during the College Art Association 2018 week in Los Angeles from February 21-24, 2018. We hope that you can attend one or all of them!

Wednesday, February 21, 2018
DAAN PANEL SESSION:

Title: The Virtual Asian American Art Museum: Postwar Japanese American Art in Chicago
2:00–3:30PM
At College Art Association L.A. Convention Center
1201 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90015
Room: 503
CAA Conference registration required

Chair: Laura Kina, DePaul University

“Chicago: Someday, Somewhere — the Photography of James Numata and Yasuhiro Ishimoto”
Jasmine Alinder, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; John Tain, Asia Art Archive

“Ray Yoshida’s Museum of Extraordinary Values”
Karen Patterson, John Michael Kohler Arts Center

“Michiko Itatani: Painting the Cosmic Novel”
Laura Kina, DePaul University

This panel focuses on the work and transnational lives of four Japanese American postwar artists—James Numata (1918–1997), Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921–2012), Ray Yoshida (1930–2009), and Michiko Itatani (1948–)—featured in the “Chicago-Midwest” module of The Virtual Asian American Art Museum (VAAAM). VAAAM is a large-scale digital humanities project led by New York University Asian/Pacific/American Institute (A/P/A) and the New York University Division of Libraries in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution and the Getty Research Institute that features enhanced access to an array of art and tools for presenting new collaborative scholarship on Asian American art history. 

The “Chicago-Midwest” module geospatially maps the careers of artists in Chicago against known social patterns and settlements in the city. The first portion of this scalable module is a series of submodules highlighting Japanese American artists whose biographies reflect immigration and migration paths of Japanese to Chicago including pre-WWII labor migration, post-WWII Japanese American internment camp resettlement, migration from Hawaii to Chicago, and post-1965 immigration from Japan. The role that institutions such as the Institute of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago had in drawing artists from around the world is examined, as is the role of archives and collections, such as those of the Japanese American Service Committee and the Art Institute of Chicago, in recording and preserving their histories. These artists are historically and/or artistically significant, but have been underrepresented in the canon of art history and master narrative of the Japanese American experience.

This new scholarship on Chicago-based content has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art as part of the foundation’s initiative Art Design Chicago, an exploration of Chicago’s art and design history and legacy.

 

 

The A/P/A Institute at NYU is the institutional sponsor of the Diasporic Asian Art Network.

Thursday, February 22, 2018
Affiliated Society Business Meeting: Diasporic Asian Art Network (DAAN)
12:30–1:30 PM
Scheduled Room at the LA Convention Center: 507
CAA Conference registration required

Please come to the DAAN business meeting to talk about the future of the network including its planned restructuring for 2019 and open positions.
The agenda will include:
• leadership positions that are open for 2019 with DAAN (organizer, regional reps, and secretary positions)
• DAAN panel topics and panel committee members
• member projects and opportunities

Friday, February 23, 2018
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) Journal Spring 2018 Issue Celebration!
3:00-5:00PM
At College Art Association L.A. Convention Center
1201 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90015
A/P/A Institute at NYU Exhibit Booth number 428, Concourse Hall EF

DAAN members are invited to the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal celebration at the exhibition hall during the conference.

Join the editors of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) journal for a toast as they celebrate the latest ADVA journal Spring 2018 double issue “Beyond Canada 150: Asian Canadian Visual Cultures” guest edited by Chris Lee, Glenn Deer, and Marissa Largo. ADVA journal is published by Brill and is a collaboration between A/P/A Institute at New York University and Concordia University’s Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

CAA Conference registration required or please email achang@nyu.edu to request a free exhibition hall pass for the event (limited amount available).

Friday, February 23, 2018
Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles “Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art” Tour, Catalog Launch, and Reception
6:00PM DAAN Tour of the exhibition
6:30PM Catalog Launch Panel/Reception
Location: Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles
425 N Los Angeles St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

DAAN members are invited to meet the museum staff and view the exhibition “Circles and Circles II: Contemporary Chinese Caribbean Art,” which is part of the “Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art” exhibitions at CAMLA and the California African American Museum, which is hosting “Circles and Circles I: History and Art of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora.” The exhibitions are part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than seventy cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty.

Join us in celebrating the release of Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art exhibition catalog with a reception and panel discussion featuring co-curator Alexandra Chang, catalog contributors: Lok Siu and Sean Metzger, and artists featured in the exhibition including Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Richard Fung, and Yoland Skeete. The evening will include a screening of short films by Richard Fung and Peter Chin, and a performance by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons during the reception.

Please RSVP for this tour and program to achang@nyu.edu.

Saturday, February 24, 2018
DAAN Patio Party at the home of artist Yong Soon Min
Time: Afternoon from 1PM
Please RSVP to achang@nyu.edu for location details.

Relax and mingle with refreshments. DAAN member artist Yong Soon Min will host a special gathering during the last day of College Art Association at her new Los Angeles home. She welcomes new and old members for some lively conversation post conference!

DAAN at College Art Association 2017 in NYC

The Diasporic Asian Art Network [DAAN] is delighted to announce the upcoming DAAN events during the College Art Association 2017 week in New York City from February 16-18, 2017. We hope that you can attend one or all of them!

DAAN GALLERY VISIT: Art 100 Gallery New York

Thursday, February 16

555 West 25th Street, Ground Floor

Free event

5h30pm — Discussion with Art 100 New York Gallery Director Michelle Loh

6h00pm — Exhibition opening reception for Construction and Contemplation: Noa Charuvi, Li Gang

 

About the exhibit:

Construction and Contemplation 

Noa Charuvi, Li Gang
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 16, 2017 6pm-8pm
February 16  – March 31, 2017

Noa Charuvi was born in Jerusalem, and now lives and works in New York City.  She holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art from the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem.   Her work is in the Time Equities collection and has been exhibited internationally, including at the Bronx Museum of Art and the Haifa Museum of Arts in Israel.  

Li Gang was born in Guangdong, China in 1962.  He now lives and works in Beijing. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.  Li’s work has been exhibited in Strasbourg, France, Heidelberg, Germany, the Venice Biennale; and in China at Today Art Museum among others.  His work is held in the collection of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, the Shanghai Artists Association, and the Guangdong Museum of Art.

 Noa Charuvi, White Sheet, Oil on Canvas

 

Li Gang, No 20161018, Ink on Paper

 

DAAN AFFILIATED SOCIETY PANEL CAA:

CANADA 150: Asian Canadians and Visual Culture in National Celebrations

Saturday, Feb 18, 2017
3:30PM – 5:00 PM
New York Hilton Midtown, 1335 6th Ave, New York
Regent Parlor, 2nd Floor
Conference registration required

Chairs: Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University; Victoria Nolte, Carleton University

Souvenirs of the Self and The Long View: Canadian National Parks and the Transnational Asian Canadian Subject within Nature
Jin-me Yoon, Simon Fraser University

Collecting “Strangeness” and “Familiarity”: Asian Canadian Photo-Poetics
Glenn Deer, University of British Columbia

Transnational Kinship, Diasporic Mourning, and Belonging in the Canadian Animation World: The Moving Images of Leslie Supnet’s gains + losses
Marissa Largo, University of Toronto

 

 

Courtesy of the artist. Jin-me Yoon, video still, Other Hauntings: A Geography Beloved (Dance), 2016, Single channel video.

More about Jin-me Yoon’s work: Through the use of gestures, activist Tera maps the geography of Gangjeong village, Jeju Island, South Korea onto her body; the beloved intimate landscape she struggles to preserve in the face ecological and social devastation caused by the recent construction of a Naval Base. A strange apparition, a seaweed-headed soldier of ambiguous gender, troubles our understanding of masculinity as well as the acceptance of military state-sanctioned violence against citizens, creatures small and large, the land, sea and all sustaining life ways.

DAAN DINNER:

After the DAAN panel, we will be gathering to go to Chinatown to visit the changing neighborhood including the new Pearl River Mart with their gallery space now showing work by artist Wiena Lin. We will talk with Pearl River Mart president Joanne Kwong. We will also visit other spaces and end for dinner at August Gatherings, 266 Canal Street (between Cortlandt Alley and Lafayette St). We will also discuss DAAN business at the start of the dinner. Dinner is Dutch treat. Please RSVP to achang@nyu.edu

Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) Special Issue Launch Event at CAA — Friday, February 17, 2017

Friday, February 17, 4:30-6:00PM
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) Journal Launch!
At College Art Association
New York Hilton Midtown – Rhinelander Gallery
1335 6th Ave
A/P/A Institute at NYU Exhibit Booth number 210
Conference Exhibit Hall registration required. If you are not registered for the conference, please contact Alex at achang@nyu.edu. There is a limited number of free tickets to the exhibit hall for the event, please email by Thursday, Feb 9th.

 

Join the editors of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) journal for a toast as they launch the latest ADVA journal — a special double issue “Island Worlds, Oceanic Diasporas, & Global Flows” guest edited by Tom Looser, Margo Machida, and Francis Maravillas. ADVA journal is published by Brill and is a collaboration between A/P/A Institute at New York University and Concordia University’s Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

The Table of Contents of the 2017 Spring double issue is below:

Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas

Vol.3 / Nos. 1-2 / Spring 2017 

Special Issue: Island Worlds, Oceanic Diasporas, and Global Flows
Guest Editors: Margo L. Machida, Thomas D. Looser, and Francis Maravillas

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL: Island Worlds, Oceanic Diasporas, and Global Flows – Margo L. Machida, Thomas D. Looser, and Francis Maravillas

ARTICLES

Pacific Itineraries: Islands and Oceanic Imaginaries in Contemporary Asian American Art – Margo L. Machida

Towards a Lexicon of Inclinations: Words Forming Worlds in Southeast Asia – Patrick Flores

Monstrous Territories, Queer Propositions: Negotiating The Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, between Australia, the Philippines, and Other (Island) Worlds – Michelle Antoinette

Looking Back at Samoa: History, Memory and the Figure of Mourning in Yuki Kihara’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? – Mandy Treagus

The Politics and Museological Representation of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Taiwan Dance – Sophie McIntyre

Umi no Utsuwa and Earth Vortex: Nobuho Nagasawa’s Interweaving of Oceanic and Island Imaginaries – Midori Yoshimoto

“Islands That Crawl and Dance” – Rebecca Jennison

Real Imaginary Diasporas – Thomas D. Looser 

ARTIST PAGES

Michael Arcega’s Code-Switching – curated by Thea Quiray Tagle

Of Love and Decomposition: Counterpoints in the Production of Space in South Bali – Leyla Stevens

REVIEWS

Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear – reviewed by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Dan Taulapapa McMullin: 100 Tiki Notes – reviewed by Kathryn Drury

Yuki Kihara: A Study of a Samoan Savage– Erika Maria Wolf

Beatrice Glow: Rhunhattan [Tearoom] – reviewed by Yu-Chieh Li

Sugar/Islands: Finding Okinawa in Hawai‘i—The Art of Laura Kina and Emily Hanako Momohara – reviewed by Ayako Yoshida

Jave Yoshimoto: The Melting World – reviewed by Larry Lee

Leonard Suryajaya: Don’t Hold On to Your Bones – reviewed by Aram Han Sifuentes

Mele Murals, Tadashi Nakamura, dir. – reviewed by Maile Arvin

PERSPECTIVES

The Art of Hydrarchy: Asian American Art as Maritime Critique and Utopian Gesture – Santhi Kavuri-Bauer

Ocean Crafts and Chinese Junk: Keywords for Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas – Sean Metzger

Application Deadline Extended l The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant 2016

Application Deadline Extended l The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant 2016

The application deadline has been extended to 30 November 2016, 6pm HKT.

Last call for proposals for Asia Art Archive’s (AAA) The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant. With support from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, the grant offers one-year fellowships to up to three individuals to study the AAA collection and develop historical research projects on topics relating to contemporary art in Mainland China, Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong.

With a panel of judges, including curators and scholars in the field, AAA will assess applicants based on their knowledge of contemporary art in the Greater China region, relevant experience in the field, proposed methodology, and research feasibility.

APPLICATION GUIDELINES

Scope

Applicants are welcome to draw on AAA’s extensive collection of primary source documents from the Greater China region, and are encouraged to propose their own topics. Applicants can develop research proposals that explore specific periods of time, themes, or phenomena in contemporary art from a broad Chinese context.

Eligible Applicants

Postgraduates (including pre-doctoral fellows) with a research focus on contemporary art or Greater China studies, and independent scholars and writers with solid research and publication track records.

Project Completion

The selected project is expected to begin in Dec 2016 and to complete by Dec 2017.

The top grantee will be required to submit interim reports updating AAA on his or her progress. Upon completion, the top grantee must submit to AAA all documents and original materials collected during the course of the project, a written paper, a complete bibliography, and an inventory of collected materials. The project will conclude with two public presentations by the grantee in Jan–Feb 2018 (one at AAA, Hong Kong).

Runner(s)-up will be required to submit a final paper and give a public presentation in Hong Kong or their relevant city.

Applicants are required to provide tentative timelines for the project.

Budget

AAA will award US$15,000 (approx. HK$120,000) to the top grantee. Budgets should allow for a two-month residency in Hong Kong; research trips to Mainland China, Taiwan, and/or Macau during the AAA residency; and acquisition of new materials.

Up to two runners-up will be awarded US$5,000 (approx. HK$40,000) each for their research projects.

Applicants are required to provide line item budgets with their proposals.

Enquires & Proposal Submission

Please send enquiries and proposals to Asia Art Archive via email to research@aaa.org.hk with:

• CV (academic history, relevant past projects, and at least two references)
• Research project description (objectives, approach, and background)
• Tentative timeline
• Budget proposal

Applicants may be contacted for additional information.

Application Deadline:
30 Nov 2016, 6pm HKT

Asia Art Archive (AAA) is an independent non-profit organisation initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. With one of the most valuable collections of material on art freely available from its website and onsite library in Hong Kong, AAA builds tools and communities to collectively expand knowledge through research, residency, and educational programmes.

Asia Art Archive
11/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
Tel: + 852 2844 1112 | Website: http://www.aaa.org.hk

Download and read ADVA Journal online! New FALL 2016 issue Vol. 2 No. 3

Download and read ADVA Journal online! New FALL 2016 issue Vol. 2 No. 3 is out!

Authors Sharda Patasar on “The Ritual Art of the Ganesh Utsav in Trinidad,” Aaron Michael Kerner on “The Circulation of Post-Millennial Extreme Cinema,” and Shepherd Steiner on “Mirror on the Wall: Photography, Logos, and the Problem of Writing in Ken Lum.”

Also a Symposium Feature for “Home Ground: Canadian Perspectives” with Jamelie Hassan, Ruba Kana’an, Robert Houle, Dot Tuer, John Greyson, Luis Jacob, Swapnaa Tamhane, Zainub Verjee

Q&A Towards an Aesthetic of Excess:
A Conversation with Laura Kina and Việt Lê
And reviews by authors Jennifer Ho for “Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture,” Douglas S. Ishii for “Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film,” Karen Kurczynski for “Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular,” and Christine Bacareza Balance for “Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power”

Also!
Perspectives article “March Eleven: ‘What If…'”
by author Trinh T. Minh-ha

Go to:
http://www.brill.com/…/asian-diasporic-visual-cultures-and-…

Individuals are eligible for free access to Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas until 31 December 2016, using access token ADVA4U.

Activate your free access in 4 easy steps:
1. go to booksandjournals.brillonline.com
2. register to create your own user account
3. go to my account and click on add content
4. enter access token and manage your publication alerts

Predicament of Contemporary Artists: Represent or Subdue Ethnicity? by Kyunghee Pyun, Ph.D at the Korean Cultural Center, NYC

AHL Public Lecture Series 2016

in Collaboration with the Korean Cultural Center NY

 

Predicament of Contemporary Artists:

Represent or Subdue Ethnicity?

by Kyunghee Pyun, Ph.D

 

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

6:30 PM – 8:00 PM

Korean Cultural Center

460 Park Avenue (57th Street), 6th Floor

Free admission; refreshments provided

 

As contemporary art seeks a global dimension in its ambition and scale, many artists from Asia now work and live in two or three different countries. Identifying roles of race and ethnicity in contemporary art and lecture has been prominent in the past decade in related disciplines of art history, art criticism, comparative literature, and ethnic studies. In visual art as much as in film or literature, experience of growing up in an ethnic context has been represented and commented by its practitioners. In fact many critics focus on an artist’s ethnic or racial background as a cause of celebration or considers it a crucial tool to interpret his/her artistic creations. This paper aims to problematize this trend by analyzing recent exhibitions held in commercial as well as institutional art settings. While the myth of “Western Art” and its universality has been challenged and overcome, art works with strong ethnic and racial background have been promoted. One may wonder how the future would shape the current categorizing of contemporary artists by its ethnic or racial affinities.

Dr. Kyunghee Pyun is an assistant professor of history of art at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She has written on Asian art as well as European medieval art. Her focus of Asian art is Asian-American visual culture and reception of Asian art in Europe and North America. “Collectors of Asian Crafts in North America: Passion for Porcelain.” Journal for the Korean Society of Art and Design [Johyung Design Yeongu] (Dec. 2015) is one of many on collectors of Asian art. Her other research interests include Global trade of decorative arts in premodern Eurasia and Americas; usage and reception of visual art in context of religious performance and liturgy; interplay of word and image; and history of art collections. Her experience of teaching a diverse range of cultural exchange between Europe and Asia has become an article, “A Journey through the Silk Road in a Cosmopolitan Classroom” in Teaching Medieval and Early-Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters Across Disciplines and Eras edited by Lynn Shutters and Karina Attar (Palgrave, 2014). She was a 2015 recipient of the Field Research Grant Korea Foundation and a 2016 recipient of the SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant (IITG). She is currently editing a book on dress reform in Asian in the early 20th century.

 

The AHL Foundation is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization founded in 2003 to support and promote visual artists of Korean heritage working in the United States. AHL’s diverse educational outreach programs including art history classes, museum & gallery tours, studio visits, artist talks and public lectures for the general public. For addition inquiries please contact info@ahlfoundation.org.

 

This program is funded, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the generous support from the NY Nanum Foundation.

“Yong Soon Min: AVM: After Venus (Mal)formation” and “Candice Lin: The mountain” at Commonwealth and Council

Yong Soon Min: AVM: After Venus (Mal)formation

Candice Lin: The mountain

November 19, 2016—January 7, 2017

New Reception Hours: Saturday, November 19, 5–7PM
Location: 3006 W 7TH ST STE 220 Los Angeles CA 90005
Exhibition Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6PM and by appointment
Closed: Thursday, November 24; Saturday, December 24; and Saturday, December 31
Opening Day Parking: 2904 W 7TH ST

Yong Soon Min: AVM: After Venus (Mal)formation

Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM) refers to an abnormal network of blood vessels in which arteries connect directly to veins instead of going through a bed of capillaries. In 2010, Yong Soon Min experienced a massive headache—triggered by the stress of a Korean language proficiency exam—that turned out to be a cerebral hemorrhage. The malformed blood vessels in the left hemisphere of her brain had ruptured, engulfing it in blood. Though AVM surgery removed the tiny abnormality, Min underwent a year-long process of therapy to rehabilitate her affected speech and memory. Even to this day, she confuses pronouns like ‘she’ and ‘he’ and often speaks one word when she means another, disrupting the relationship between the signifier and the signified.

Installed above a printed flooring of Min’s personal library of books and mementos, a decagon-shaped table extends around a partition wall which divides the exhibition space into halves, like the two hemispheres of the brain. The ten sections are cut through with five corresponding pairs of words: pizza/pyramid; diaspora/diarrhea; womb/tomb; happiness/penis; and thank/spank. Across the surface, glass spheres flow along the grooves suggesting synaptic connection between each pair. The benches for the visitors to sit on are carved with phrases based on Min’s memory retrieval of five slogans, including one which she inherited from her parents: 남남북녀 (nam nam buk nyuh), a severe shorthand expression that means: ‘handsome South Korean men are best with beautiful North Korean women.’ In the two corners of the space, wall vinyl of a Vulcan greeting and air quotes connect like a Mobius strip suggesting that cognition is based on a foundation of constructs within which language can elaborate our thoughts, yet becomes susceptible to the slip of the tongue.

“Last Notes and Sketches, Min Tae Yong (1918-2001)” is an homage to Min’s father composed of folded panels in the style of Korean byung poong. The pages are displayed as swiveling windows to reveal marks on both sides. On disposable notepads, her father’s handwritings and diagrams combine complex and sophisticated ideas about physics, revealing an obsessive mind for order and latent cognitive strife. Written in Korean, the panels contain thirteen concepts of the multiverse that defy easy translation. In his “Cognitive Transitive Simulation To Achieve Communication” prose, Min Tae Yong writes about being in a ‘cosmic membrane’ composed of ‘cosmoans, galaxians, starmen,’ and all the anthropic entities whose spirits permeate the cosmos. He ends this page with a series of questions: “Is the spirit strong enough? Is the technology advanced enough? To be able to be on line with them?” This final draft bears the deliberate marks of his revision as he crossed out ‘the’ to replace it with ‘your.’

Candice Lin: The mountain

There was a painting of a mountain that hung in the hallway of my childhood. Every evening it would berate me as I lay in my bed, like a cockroach, unable to rise. It called me a silly girl, a cupcake, a deformed puppy, a toenail, and a rock. It told me I was sick and lazy and that I masturbated the wrong way and too much. The painting depicted Humboldt’s mountain and it organized the strata of the world, the plants by their habitual altitude, and the ways that other mountains did or did not measure up.[i]

In the mythologies of the world, flawed superhumans or failed gods are torn apart in fits of rage or jealousy and the fragments of their bodies fall and fossilize, becoming landscape. In plate tectonics, mountains mark the areas where one surface pushes against another fragment of its lost self, a Platonic pansexual Pangeaic dream of earthquakes and never enough. Their grinding is fraught with a mineral desire to change one’s shape, to lose one’s temporary boundaries.

“The mountain” is the sediment—scar tissue built up in a slow accumulation of flesh wounds—pulling, pushing, and burying what was lost in the call and response. Its remnants of historical violence are arbitrary, relegated to the land of folk. This mythology is barely seen because, like skin, it surrounds us.

“The mountain” is a consideration of matter in four different stages: putrefaction, petrification, surface, and memory. Each stage is presented as a tableau of objects upon a reverse glass painting of various textures, mythological scenes collaged with historical and contemporary images. Many of the objects utilize living or natural processes, such as the mineralization of chemicals onto a taxidermied reptile (petrification) or the growth of edible mold on a tondo of resin-preserved mushrooms (putrefaction).

“The mountain” contains an ecosystem of entangled lives. There are silkworms weaving their cocoons which can be used to cleanse and whiten human faces (surface); their spit becomes a shroud to the familiar word “Father” written in George Psalmanazar’s made-up language—an 18th century foreigner who created an idea of the Orient.[ii] The surface is ever-changing.

ºººººººººººº

Memory 1: On one of the four tables, there are mushrooms used for cultivating memory-production. These are hydrated and kept alive by a fine mist of liquid distilled from our communal piss.[iii]

Memory 2: I came home late last night to find two bottles of urine in a brown paper bag slung over my dilapidated fence. It was bottled so beautifully I could not resist a sniff and then a taste. Don’t worry; I kept it for the communal pool, though I was tempted to drink it all. I would guess that the bottle containing less was a vegetable-eater; its flavor of salt was so punctuated by an herbaceousness that it opened my eyes wide. The other one was softer, more mellow and fragrant like metallic earth with a tinge of ocean.

Memory 3: Before you died, you lived for years with a hole cut into your throat and would pour your whisky into your beer to soften the burn. You said you liked mixing things into beer and once you pissed in a cup of beer and gave it to a collector who was annoying you. He didn’t notice the salty taste. But I did.

_____________________________________

[i] I am reminded of a story of a woman who came in really drunk to the tattoo parlor and revealed a tattoo of a giant penis marked as a measuring stick emblazoned on the length of her torso from the crotch up, with Old English Script written above it: “Measure Up.” She asked, “Can you turn this into the Scales of Justice? I’m a firm believer in the Truth.”

[ii] George Psalmanazar was a European who lived in London in the early 1700s within an invented persona as a “Formosan.” He wrote an ethnographic text about his life, culture, language, and religion, and survived for many years on the proceeds and hospitality of hosts who found him exotic and charming.

[iii] Thank you to friends and members of the Commonwealth and Council community for the generous donation of your urine, including Julie Tolentino, Pigpen, Gala Porras-Kim, Ashley Hunt, Jeanine Oleson, Clara López Menéndez, Patrick Staff, Joel Freeman, Jennifer Moon, laub, David Bell, Cirilo Domine, Patricia Fernández, Eduardo Consuegra, Elana Mann, Tala Mateo, Yong Soon Min, Benjamin Love, Danielle Dean, Young Joon Kwak, Marvin Astorga, Kang Seung Lee, Geoffrey Wall, Jen Smith, Olga Koumoundouros, Michael Ned Holte, and Alice Könitz. Our collective urine will be distilled into a fluid resembling water, but retaining a high mineral content and any pharmaceutical or hormonal properties ingested by the contributors.

LAMOA DS#3 presents pod: Kelly Akashi, Anne Cousineau, and Danielle Dean organized by laub

November 19, 2016—March 4, 2017

As we inject our future into the materiality of things, where is our bodily focus? Who are we within our constructed reality? In Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matters, we are introduced to our not so stranger, discarded selves—stacked within the homes of hoarders, swirled into plastic islands in oceans and clogged inside storm drains. What Bennett encourages is a conversation with the thingness that surrounds us. Similar to Karen Barad’s idea of intra-action, which can be described as “the mangling of people and things and other stuff’s ability to act” from within the relationship rather than from outside of it. Our porous bodies are enmeshed with the thingness of our industrialized, formalized, and consumerized, product-driven, global warming selves. It is amidst this seemingly apocalyptic time that we begin to understand what this entanglement entails for the future of life as we know it.

Kelly Akashi, as artist as alchemist, explores materials that melt, harden, shape and reshape invoking unseen essences of what an object is, was, and is to become. Anne Cousineau works with organic materials that decay and transform, queering notions of permanence, stability, and time. Danielle Dean’s video, BioWhite, materializes social constructs of racism by paralleling Louis Kahn’s excessive use of concrete with the burgeoning of skin lightening enterprises.

Kelly Akashi lives and works in Los Angeles, and has studied at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (MFA); Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main; and Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (BFA). Her work has recently been shown at the Hammer Museum (Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only); David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; The Jewish Museum, New York; Shanaynay, Paris; White Flag Projects, Saint Louis; Tomorrow Gallery, New York (solo); Michael Jon & Alan, Miami (solo); Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Akashi’s solo exhibition, Being as a Thing, is currently on view at Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles until December 23, 2016.

Anne Cousineau is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. Through material investigations, Anne entangles cultural notions of the synthetic and organic to consider questions of the body within nature. They received a BFA in Painting from The Rhode Island School of Design and are currently a MFA candidate at The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College.

Danielle Dean’s work draws from her multi-national background of being English, American, and Nigerian. Her work explores the colonialism of mind and body—the interpellation of the subject by power structures working through digital media, news, and advertising. She focuses on target-marketing practices that reinscribe markers such as race, gender, age, etc. She is interested in subverting such processes toward a non-essentialized space of being. Solo exhibitions include: Focus, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Hexafluorosilicic, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include: Shifters, Art in General, New York; It Can Howl, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; What Shall We Do Next, Diverse Works, Houston; and Made in L.A. 2014, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Her video work was recently screened at MOMA PS1, New York. Residencies include: The Whitney’s Independent Study Program, New York; and The Core Program, Houston. Dean is a Rema Hort Mann Foundation and Creative Capital awardee, and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and BFA from Central St Martins.

Commonwealth and Council
3006 W 7TH ST STE 220
Los Angeles CA 90005
213 703 9077
www.commonwealthandcouncil.com