The New York Times Highlights The Appearance Art Exhibition
The New York Times Highlights The Appearance Art Exhibition
The newspaper describes Americas Society's show as "intriguing" and says that it illuminates "important histories of Asian and Asian American art."
An intriguing smaller exhibition at Americas Society situates “Asian American” on a wider stage. Where “Legacies” is about a strength-in-numbers concentration of artists of Asian descent in a single urban space, the show at Americas Society—“The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean”—illustrates the opposite dynamic: the dispersal of artists of Asian descent over an immense geography that encompasses much of South America.
The artists in “Legacies” share common formal languages: Pop-inflected figurative work early on, then a move toward conceptual modes. The 30 artists in “The Appearance,” though, seem to be working — at least as presented here — in stylistic isolation, each expressing “Asian-ness” in a different way. Some ways are straightforward. The Guyanese-Indian artist Suchitra Mattai weaves and braids figures from discarded saris. The Afro-Chinese Jamaican artist Albert Chong (he is also in “Legacies)” turns himself into a Rastafarian Buddha in long-exposure photographic self-portraits. And the sublime Kyoto-born Tomie Ohtake (1913-2015), who traveled to Brazil on a family trip in 1936 and settled there, produced abstract paintings that suggest muscle-memory exercises in Japanese calligraphy. For certain artists, dual identity produces tensions. Mimian Hsu, a Costa Rican artist of Taiwanese descent, embroiders texts from anti-Asian government documents on sheets of a red silk fabric traditionally used for Chinese wedding gowns.
With the image of a clock face, the Venezuelan Korean artist Suwon Lee ruefully reduces her identity to a matter of timing: when to be Latina, when to be Asian, when to be neither, or both. The Peruvian Chinese David Zink Yi, who now lives in Berlin, says that his half-human, half-beast ceramic figures express “the intensity of being lost.” And in fact, most of the artists in this exhibition, organized by Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael, give off something of that lonely vibe. So it would be great, in the future, to see each of them viewed, as the New York City artists in “Legacies” are, in the context of the communities to which diaspora brought them, placing them on the ungraded turf of something called home.
