Queering Contemporary Asian American Art

EDITED BY LAURA KINA AND JAN CHRISTIAN BERNABE
FOREWORD BY SUSETTE MIN
AFTERWORD BY KYOO LEE

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art takes Asian American differences as its point of departure, and brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. Taken together, these nine original artist interviews, cutting-edge visual artworks, and seven critical essays explore contemporary currents and experiences within Asian American art, including the multiple axes of race and identity; queer bodies and forms; kinship and affect; and digital identities and performances.
Using the verb and critical lens of “queering” to capture transgressive cultural, social, and political engagement and practice, the contributors to this volume explore the connection points in Asian American experience and cultural production of surveillance states, decolonization and diaspora, transnational adoption, and transgender bodies and forms, as well as heteronormative respectability, the military, and war. The interdisciplinary and theoretically informed frameworks in the volume engage readers to understand global and historical processes through contemporary Asian American artistic production.

“The editors disrupt notions of race, gender, and art to question the limits of each of these categories. A thoughtful and challenging collection that makes an important contribution to the fields of Asian American studies and visual culture.”
-LeiLani Nishime, author of Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture

“Queering Contemporary Asian American Art provides a vital intervention and gendered counterpoint to the ways in which Asian Americans are usually racialized, demonized, and betrayed by mainstream academia and media.”
-Russell Leong, editor of Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts

“This volume stands as a bracing and provocative testament to the expansive critical and expressive possibilities of fluid concepts like ‘queering’ in dismantling, recasting, and realigning extant representations of Asian American identities, subjectivities, and positions in the twenty-first century world.”
-Margo Machida, author of Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary

“Queer is a piquant term: as noun adjective, and verb, it is put to good use in this thoughtful collection of essays and interviews. The contributors variably attend to the marked body, challenging assumptions about it, including its readability. These writings demonstrate the ways that bold, contemporary artists are moving beyond rigid binaries and cynical,�multi-culturalist systems. Their invitation to critically engage differences and norms is most welcome.”
-Jacqueline Francis, author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America

For more information on this book and to purchase, click here.Best Nike Sneakers | 『アディダス』に分類された記事一覧

A Moving Image Artist Finds Freedom After Abandoning the Film Industry

By Craig Hubert

(Excerpt)

Craig Hubert: What initially drew you to moving images?

Cauleen Smith: The main thing was learning about the way cinema works on us subconsciously, the way different shots convey information nonverbally. Once I realized that was the way moving images were working on me when I was watching television or film, I really wanted to make images that didn’t produce harm, and images that I really wanted to see. That’s what drew me to filmmaking in the first place: I wanted to have control over the images as opposed to having to passively submit to what was being presented to me.

CH: Has that thinking about taking control over the images changed over time?

CS: That was more of a priority when I was thinking more about narrative and representation. I feel like my work is moving more and more toward—maybe it’s not abstraction, but something that is less dependent on representation, or of people projecting their desires on something. My work now operates for people to engage and find their own way through something, as opposed to telling people what to think.

CH: Why the break from narrative and representation?

CS: I really gave up on narrative film and the film industry. Things have now changed, but I wasn’t willing to stick it out over the last 15 years waiting for things to change [laughs]. I didn’t want to have to pitch ideas or beg for money from people who had no investment in what I cared about. It was just trying to figure out how to make something that they were comfortable with as opposed to making something that was interesting, or powerful. And the art world has more receptivity to ideas. The film world is not about ideas, but things that we can consume. There were fewer gatekeepers as far as control of ideas in the arts communities that I found, and so I felt really free to pursue the edges of ideas and ways of making that I found interesting as opposed to trying to conform all my values into the kind of practice that didn’t serve my interests at all.

To read the full interview click here.

Featured image:

Cauleen Smith, “Lessons in Semaphore” (2015, still) (image courtesy the artist)

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Last month alumni Kathryn Eddy and LA Watson presented projects at the Eastern Kentucky University Living With Animals Conference along with keynote speakers Steve Baker, Keri Cronin, Brett Mizelle, Michał Pręgowski, and April Truitt. Eddy presented the Urban/Wild Coyote project and Watson discussed the Past Lives: Roadside Memorial project she completed in 2013 while a student at VCFA.

Along with Eddy and Watson, a third VCFA alumna, Janell O’Rourke form the ArtAnimalAffect coalition. Formed in 2013, its mission states:

“a coalition of artists whose work exists within the critical and multidisciplinary framework of animal studies. This blog will serve as an online presence for our collective to include art, exhibits, booklists, and the occasional recipe. Through our artwork, we aim to raise the awareness of animal issues, as well as provide exhibit opportunities for contemporary artists working with human and non human animal relationships.”

Together, Eddy, Watson, and O’Rourke have co-edited The Art of the Animal: Fourteen Women Artists Explore the Sexual Politics of Meat, published by Lantern Books, NYC. A catalogue and book of essays that support the work currently on view at The Animal Museum in Los Angeles, that ArtAnimalAffect have also co-curated.

During the Living With Animals Conference keynote speaker and Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, Steve Baker, called the exhibition at The Animal Museum “timely and important.”

As a coalition, Eddy, Watson, and O’Rourke continue to investigate the intersectionality of racism, sexism, domestic violence, and the oppression of animals. Indeed a timely and important pursuit.

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