Abstract
This chapter describes a shift in Asian art shows in the late 1990s, highlighting the growing prominence of Chinese Art. The author examines how this shift impacted Asian American women artists in California. The chapter focuses on Chinese artist Hung Liu, who has been living in California for decades and does not identify as Asian American. Her need to reference her national identity and roots in presenting the subject of her art appears to be deeply connected to a transnational cultural politics that masks under cosmopolitanisms an emerging Chinese national discourse. An analysis of the Asian Art Museum shows on Shanghai shows the recurring orientalism and celebration of modern art in a Eurocentric frame. The author develops a critique of the current transnational promotion of Chinese art, as indirectly reinforcing elitist Eurocentrism, and fueling neo-orientalist appetites reflected by recent California exhibits. Many contemporary art institutions embrace curatorial choices that silently marginalize diasporic artists in the USA, involuntarily erasing historical connections and continuities across the Pacific Rim, all the while reassuring Western audiences of their cosmopolitanism. The chapter concludes with a political critique of the Pacific Rim celebration, as erasing the historical patterns of Asian American communities, rendering Asian artists more marginal in comparison to Chinese artists.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2016 she started with American history themes.
- 2.
As summarized in Moser’s interview: Hung Liu was born in 1948 in Changchun, at the time, the capital city of the Japanese puppet/exiled Emperor Pu Yi. Her father was a captain in the Nationalist Army (the Kuomintang) of Shek, and was arrested, when Liu was an infant, by Communist forces as the family fled the city looking for food. After Changchun fell to the Communists, she returned with her remaining family. At age eleven, she went to Beijing. When she was twenty years old, Liu was sent to the countryside for proletarian “reeducation” during the Cultural Revolution. After several years, she attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and started teaching there in 1981 (Moser 2011, p. 77).
- 3.
Her story was told in the popular novel Thousand Pieces of Gold, by Ruthanne Lum McCunn (1988). A bestseller, later translated into a documentary produced by PBS in the early 1980s.
- 4.
The most interesting sign documentation of this is a photo published on the first page of the volume edited by Ella Shohat, Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (1998), as part of a series curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum of New York.
- 5.
I realize that it may seem far-fetched to use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term of intersectionality, and her methodological point, when applying it in the context of female artists.
- 6.
Liu has traveled back to China quite regularly since the 1990s, but the last decade is a turning point in terms of her reconnection to the Chinese art scene.
- 7.
This term was coined by Gayatri Spivak to describe a practice, specifically to critique aspects of Indian politics and the mobilization of essentialist discourses for political aims and appears in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987). It has been used widely in feminist, queer and postcolonial theory, despite Spivak’s own distancing from such uses. I find it useful here when looking at the self-presentation by minorities, which does not presume one to naively believe in essentialism, but recognizes agency in one’s use of essentialist labels to present oneself, which can lead to more visibility, or strengthening of political goals. Strategic essentialism as a temporary strategy does not preclude the possibility that within a specific group, or one’s own identity, there would be internal debates and multiplicities. Such internal differences may just not be presented to the outside, to dominant discourses and groups for political reasons.
- 8.
Connery points at a few factors as key to study of the Pacific Rim: the United States–China rapprochement; the end of the Vietnam War and the worldwide economic downturn of the mid-1970s; the economic strength of Japan in the 1980s, and the attendant realization that Japan was no longer an admirable latecomer to modernization.
It was an age when US hegemony was questioned, or doubted, as never before in the postwar era (Connery 1994, p. 33).
- 9.
See Connery in Boundary 2, 21, no.1 (1994): 30–56.
- 10.
See official website of the mentioned show: https://asianart.com/exhibitions/samurai/index.html.
- 11.
Yu, Sijia. 2009. “Urban development of Shanghai in the recent decade.” Time + Architecture 110, pp. 12–19.
- 12.
The same exact binary was used as the key idea behind the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing, a massive spectacle directed by Zhang Yimou.
- 13.
The peculiarity of California is concentration: the number quoted above represents more than 30% of the total US Asian population.
- 14.
Its is worth remembering here the listing of new art biennial and triennial large exhibits in Asia: the Istanbul Biennial, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, the Nagoya Biennale, the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh, the Triennale of India in New Delhi, the Guangzhou Biennial, the Taipei, Busan, and Kwangju Biennials, and the Asian Pacific Art Triennale in Brisbane, Australia. The moment of global competition for international, large art shows is documented by Charlotte Bydler, in her critical analysis The Global Art World, Inc. on the globalization of contemporary art. In Bydler’s view, the biennial has been packaged as an exportable format model, to be moved around internationally, not differently from how industries relocate their facilities and flagship stores according to the investors’ responses. International shows follow the paradigm of global competition: creating portable, exportable products, but still promoting a specific city or nation’s brand.
- 15.
See Dirlik, Arif, Vinay Bahl and Peter Gran. History After the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. See also Xu Dong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-garde Fiction, and New Chinese Cinema, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
- 16.
Many scholars have written about this period’s popular cultural productions, including Shu Mei Shi, Peter Feng, Gina Marchetti, Friedrich Schodt, Mike Davis, and more recently, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Kimberly Hoang from a gendered perspective.
- 17.
Nostalgia can be expressed both as a longing for the past by those in power for a previous condition of colonial power—central for Europeans—but also as a “longing for” by the people in exile who romanticize their country of origin as their true place of belonging, as if it were forever traditional and stayed as it was when they left. The immigrants’ nostalgia is deeply rooted and more bitter than that of the “empowered” receiving nations.
- 18.
Neo-orientalism is used here to point at the changes that have taken place since 1978, when Edward Said wrote the text Orientalism. The dualism of West and the oriental “other” is still at work today, although in more globalized and technologically mediated forms that have redefined some East–West boundaries. Oftentimes, neo-orientalism is used in this book with a negative connotation, to point at the fact that it is even more pernicious and unjust today—especially in the art world—than in the contexts analyzed by Edward Said.
- 19.
Art fairs, private galleries and auctions attest that there are vast trans-Asian regional networks and continuities worth exploring in their own terms, not in relation to the USA.
- 20.
In 2016, Zhang Daqian’s “Peach Blossom Spring” sold at auction at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for more than US$34 million. The buyers, Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang, previously bought an Amedeo Modigliani painting for US$170.4 million, the second-highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction. In 2008, China surpassed France as the world’s third-biggest auction market, behind only the United States and Britain. The most famous contemporary artists from China have been able to sell their paintings for over one million dollars each, almost steadily, each year in the last decade. A 1995 painting by Zhang Xiaogang sold for more than US$6 million to a Taiwanese-born collector now living in the United States. Xu Bing sketches are worth a million dollars, gunpowder-on-paper works by Cai Guo Qiang are also worth one million US$, and Yue Minjun self-portraits are worth US$2.6 million. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/arts/design/10auct.html.
- 21.
For a thorough critique of multiculturalism see the writings of Jeff Chang, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Vijay Prashad, Stuart Hall, Rey Chow and Mike Davis.
- 22.
Another artist living in San Francisco most of her life, Keiko Nelson, actualized a similar strategic essentialism, maintaining a strong connection to Japan and acting as a liaison to Kyoto city for artists for San Francisco. Nevertheless, she also defines herself as an Asian American artist and participated in AAWAA shows and events. Japanese art has enjoyed a great deal of visibility since the 1970s in the West, and so we could hypothesize that it was strategic for her to maintain her national identification when presenting her work to US audiences.
- 23.
In the years when I lived in New York, after 9/11, I was struck by the sudden interest in Afghan art, Iranian women artists, and that Iraqi intellectuals were invited to speak, to perform their “authentic” traditions together with their dissenting voice, as if their role was to make New Yorkers listen to their pain and atone. In my subconscious, Catholic, mentality, I felt compelled to attend and listen to them, but I gradually felt that liberal intellectuals were all involved in a sort compensatory mechanism animated by their own need of the other, as if their attention to artists would magically reduce the material impact of the infinite war. Most importantly, I realized the same desire of contact with the other, and the implicit request of the Afghani or Iraqi to downplay their cosmopolitan, diasporic selves. Since then I have been looking at artists’ bios to detect how their presentation from the curator may function according to a similar mechanism of distancing, and othering.
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Fantone, L. (2018). Red and Gold Washing. In: Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms. Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2_5
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