The Brooklyn Rail Writes a Review of Americas Society's exhibition The Appearance
The Brooklyn Rail Writes a Review of Americas Society's exhibition The Appearance
The exhibit "gives us insight into the experience of Asian people in Latin America and the Caribbean," says the art publication.
Before The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean, curated by Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael, work from the Asian diaspora had not been part of the exhibition program at the Americas Society, which has been dedicated to exhibiting art from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada since the mid-1960s. In this show, a dialogue among thirty artists’ works in sculpture, painting, photography, video, installation, and conceptual art highlights references to Eastern culture and philosophy, social marginalization, being visible and invisible, materiality and immateriality, and crossing cultures. Focusing on the demographic heritage of the artists gives us insight into the experience of Asian people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Members of a diaspora can experience a sense of displacement and nostalgia for the familiar, the loss of community and conflict about cultural assimilation. They may also experience the pressure to code-switch, or to translate their cultural practices for others while embodying a cultural heritage disconnected from the present. To cope, members of a diaspora may fiercely preserve their home culture or conversely, or disassociate from the inherited culture, enduring prejudice and injustice from society while trying to build a better life. [...]
The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean has given New York a taste of what could eventually be the foundation for a more expansive exhibition of Latin American and Caribbean Asian diaspora artists at a museum giving more depth to the historic context and timeline of work coming from this demographic group, but also how the work may relate to other artists from the same time periods. In this exhibition we can acknowledge and feel some of the influences specific to the Asian diaspora, and the importance to make these known, as they often have been historically omitted from institutional exhibitions, history books, criticism, and collections. Ultimately it would greatly serve the work to understand it within the context of other art and ideas being exchanged across the Americas, as artists have generally always crossed borders while institutions and the market have dictated who gets to be seen and considered important.
