Statement from Bob Lee, Executive Director of the Asian American Arts Centre
I want to thank Think!Chinatown for this chance to be part of this intergenerational effort. This is the first time I have been invited to participate in such an endeavor. To have our collected resources, particularly the Permanent Collection of hundreds of paintings, drawings, and sculptures, be made accessible to young curators, enabling them to choose which artworks they find meaningful, is a special moment. Our interactions and dialogue will benefit audiences and everyone involved.
I’ve had the chance to work with Asian American artists for many years and to present their works to the local- and city-wide community. This rare opportunity continues, and I want very much to share what I can about the collection and Asian American art.
My engagement with Asian American art began before I came to Lower Manhattan and Chinatown. I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where my family’s hand laundry served the downtown area where Black and Puerto Rican people were then settling. The Chinatown near my family’s business was gradually being replaced by parking lots, authorized by the city to rid it of its Chinese enclave. When I attended Rutgers University - Newark, I met a professor in the Art department who taught students to look at art intently, not referring to textbooks but instead drawing on our own intuitions. We started with the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, before moving on to the formation of civilizations in China and India, even the nomadic peoples of early Europe. He was a contemporary artist and Sinologist — his name was George Weber. After many Studio and Art History courses, I started coming to Manhattan’s Chinatown in 1969 just as the Asian American Movement was forming. There, I became involved with Basement Workshop. This is where I began to see clearly how I could use my art historical education to further our efforts to support the Chinatown and Asian American community. The introduction to the early beginnings of Asian cultures opened me to see and feel the dilemma of being both Asian and American — an oxymoron, as one scholar has recently put it. Artists face the challenge of creating a contemporary art that reflects themselves, their community and their world — this called for a change in perception.
In the 1980s, it was considered taboo by many to exhibit artists on the basis of race and ethnicity. For a time, there was a blackout on press coverage for exhibitions that featured artists based on their Asianness. The flawed ideal of being “colorblind,” of seeing a person based only on their merit and not on their skin color, continues, failing to welcome us as whole beings and allow our differences to be seen as assets. Old ways of seeing and knowing the world were challenged by the demand to be exhibited and recognized as valid. Exhibitions of BIPOC are common now, an '80s breakthrough still contested by some, enabling us to embrace our human bio-diversity and cultural diversity.
Hundreds of exhibitions took place at AAAC, the full chronological record of them all is on our website, alongside our online archive of some of the best artists we exhibited. You can see how AAAC began, what we did, and which artists were in each exhibition, as well as images of some of the press materials and artworks we exhibited. Through them, you can see how we addressed the presence and fullness of Asian American art, how its identity furthers the complexity, diversity, and direction of the nation, as well as our historical linkage to other people of color and to indigenous traditions.
AAAC’s funding source was initially called “Ghetto Arts” before it was changed to “Special Arts Services,” demonstrating how communities of color were perceived by government funding agencies. When exhibitions of artists of color became popular, gaining visibility and attention in the late '80s early '90s, our call for increased support in diverse communities was met with the reverse — philanthropy’s funding of “New Audiences” programs for larger institutions, hanging small community organizations like AAAC out to dry. What started out as an authentic attempt at Multiculturalism, developed locally, eventually devolved into the art market and media’s flattened, easily-digestible, and politically anodyne version of identity issues. Asian contemporary art arising internationally, particularly in China, drew mainstream attention away from Asian American art. By 2010 we had established artasiamerica.org — our online archive, but a revival of interest in Asian American art would not come until the Alt-Right and attendant Anti-Asian Violence provoked it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this context the phrase “Asian American art'' serves more as a political term than an aesthetic one and also refers to our brief history in these United States. My perspective, however, began with the formation of Asian civilizations — in deep time. This is where it is possible to begin to imagine how notions of both “East” and “West” evolved in relationship to each other, along the so-called Silk Route. In this ancient soil, fresh history is still being written. “Alternatives to the Story of Christopher Columbus,” an exhibition we did on this theme in 1992, raised questions of how white supremacy started in the early Middle Ages in the clash with the nomadic Migration Peoples. Along the Silk Route, we may find how the emphasis on the man-made world and the disregard and abuse of the natural world began, and learn important clues as to how to address it. Asian American art has been a door for me that opens to the world.
Turn your attention, now, to the work that has been chosen to exhibit here — some, you will see nowhere else. Look at Soonim Kim’s life-size portrait head, shown at One Pike, and see that it is, amazingly, made of wool! Raw fibers form a face, shaping each of her features, the incredible raw, woolly texture of her skin so soft to the touch as to seem weightless. What skills were harnessed to create such a marvel? Indeed, the artist adapted and invented in order to create. Taught by her grandmother at an early age she was well-schooled in needlepoint by the time the artist went to art school. She was there introduced to drawing techniques with charcoal sticks. Art students will remember their lessons in chiaroscuro, capturing the shades of light and shadow as it fell across the surface of a table or a chair, a scene keenly observed in light values. Soonim wondered if she could do this with her needlepoint. First in low relief, then in higher relief, eventually she could render her perceptions in the full round. In this way, Soonim brought together her Asian feminine sensibility with a Western way of seeing into her art — a most direct manifestation of what Asian American art is. If you have visited the Greek and Roman sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum, you have seen the portrait heads of Roman patriarchs that are so similar to Soonim’s head — except they are made of marble. Soonim Kim’s portrait is an inversion: a poignant rendering of a soft, kind, gentle person in the moment of light that it was captured.
Look at Sung Ho Choi’s piece Mind (2006), on display at Pearl River Mart, for which the Chinese character “⼼“ (xin) is written in gold dots. Rendered with lottery tickets, the character has two meanings. Aside from “mind,” it also means “heart.” In the West, according to Greek philosophy, ideas are permanent and the heart is emotional, unreliable. In East Asia, someone might speak of something important, and point to their heart, since thinking was conceived as one heartmind. The character ‘Xin’ has meant this for centuries. In Chinatown, I see many Asian people amidst their daily toil in America's immigrant economy, invoking their chance to win as if each day's luck has to do with what their life may offer. Risk is part of our fundamental human equation. It can be met with joy, even affection, regardless of how the numbers for the Lottery turn out. Tomorrow is another day! It’s a moment, perhaps a special one, which we can look to in our day, a way of thinking that is light of heart. The Tao of one heartmind. Sung Ho Choi's art speaks to Asian immigrant life in the West, of the choice all Asian Americans have as to how to "think."
Consider two artworks. One, by Toshio Sasaki, is entitled Sun Gate (), a sketch for a monumental entrance to Manhattan Bridge. It was one of several submitted proposals to AAAC for the “Public Art in Chinatown” exhibition in 1988. A creative contemporary gateway to Chinatown and to New York City. This massive form, standing upon two legs, sustains a beam of light that reaches up to the night sky, a light we have seen marking 9/11 for the World Trade Center memorial. The elevated circular form is like the “bi,” a Chinese symbol for the celestial universe. It is an ethical order modelled after a vision of the universe, composed to upstaging the columnated structured entrance to the bridge that still stands there today.
Finally, consider the work by Julia Nee Chu, entitled After June 4, China, at One Pike. The work consists of a small box — like sculpture made of wire, threads and wax. Its subject is what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 to the students and the massacre that engulfed them. A monumental political event that transformed China, if not the world. We had more than 300 artists created artwork for this exhibition — CHINA: June 4, 1989 which traveled over a four year period in the United States and to Hong Kong. From outrage, to horror, to condemnation, to sober predictions for the future, none brought the tenderness, delicacy, simplicity, and sorrow that Julia Nee Chu did to the immensity of what June 4th was. Our sorrow is forever trapped inside her porous wired box. How do two such works manage to be in the same exhibition? Can you glimpse the potential of the Asian American sensibility — its imaginative potential? You could say its unlikely NYC would ever build Toshio’s gate. True, but a similar idea along the same lines as Toshio’s is underway in Australia to the tune of ten million dollars.
Where might Asian American art go next? What might it show us? What might it show everyone? Through art we can be part of a culture that undergirds our country and determines where our world is going, how it’s changing, how it’s happening.
Art is us. Tune in.
Bob Lee