Asian American Art Now
It has been more than a decade since New York’s Asia Society staged ‘Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art’, 1994, an exhibition sharing the same kind of political and curatorial ambitions as ‘The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980’s’, 1990 (a joint production of the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Studio Museum of Harlem) and the Whitney Museum’s ‘Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art’, 1994, exhibitions that helped define the fractious terms of identity art in the nineties. In ‘One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now’, co-curated by Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette S. Min, the Asia Society offers a contemporary reprise of that earlier exercise. This show comprises work by seventeen artists, all of them young—most are under thirty-five—and all with at least one parent of Asian descent. Ranging across media, this exhibition suggests identity to be a much more mutable concept than it was in the art of the nineties.
So mutable in fact that while questions of origin serve as a reasonable point of departure for curatorial consideration of an artist’s practice, it is arguable whether they do so for most of the work in the exhibition. Laurel Nakadate meets strangers, goes home with them and videotapes the proceedings. Backed by Elvis and Neil Young tunes, her ‘I Want to be the One To Walk in the Sun’ 2006 is in turn playful, narcissistic, voyeuristic, silly and wrenching. There is, too, an element of girlishness, shared by Mari Eastman whose gently insouciant paintings combine prettiness and irony with a sprinkling of her signature glitter. A different note is struck in Indigo