The Appearance Is Included in Hyperallergic's "15 NYC Art Shows to See in October"
The Appearance Is Included in Hyperallergic's "15 NYC Art Shows to See in October"
"This is the exact type of curatorial work we need to illuminate a conceit as slippery as diaspora," says the arts magazine about Americas Society's show.
An exhibition of artists of Asian descent affiliated with Latin America shown in New York City is an admittedly complex premise, but this is the exact type of curatorial work we need to illuminate a conceit as slippery as diaspora. Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael’s masterful curation makes it impossible to ignore our own positions within larger systems, whether they be the physical space of the exhibition — your feet poised to trip over Esvin Alarcón Lam’s video work placed inconveniently on the floor, for instance — or the ways in which race is read, misread, or unreadable depending on the relation between the viewer and the object. Speaking for myself, the embroidered floral iconography of Mimian Hsu’s “No. 1674, Sección Administrativa, Version 1 & 2” (2007–24) is viscerally familiar — I had stitched those same flowers with my grandmother as a child — but I had to rely on a nearby label to translate the Spanish text stitched into it, affirming how vexed cultural translatability is even between diasporas that share a homeland.
