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Asian | American | Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970

by Daniell Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson, Editors
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2008
168 pp., illus. 95 col., 12 b/w. Trade, $45.00
ISBN: 978-0-520-25864-8.

Reviewed by: Aparna Sharna

aparna31s@netscape.net

In Culture and Imperialism (1994) , Edward Said argues that Modernism's reaction against the Victorian novel and value system situates in it a stance critical of the colonial project. Exhibition catalogue, Asian | American | Modern Art -- Shifting Currents, 1900-1970, furnishes this critique from the specific perspective of Asian-American arts practices that developed in the United States from the turn of the 20 th century until the 1970s when 'Asian-American' became a designated category within American public discourse. The text does not posit the modernist sentiment within Asian-American arts in unitary terms of say technique or practice. Instead, the approach is more holistic whereby modernism is presented as a critical discourse spanning creativity and cultural diversity. The works and essays in the catalogue reflect free borrowings of influences from modern art practices of Europe and America that complexly intermingle with the artists' own cultural backgrounds, including varied philosophical discourses, arts practices, techniques and experiences of migration. This is an extremely useful move because within the modernist art discourse, art historians have identified a tendency towards 'primitivism', which when applied in the Asian context risks slipping into the essentialisms of the 'East-West' binary. The works included in this catalogue, as indeed modern art from Asia and the Asia-Pacific regions bears an intercultural claim that undermines the essentialisms of culture in original and ahistoricised terms. In his essay, Journeys into Abstraction, catalogue editor, Daniell Cornell states: 'Too often Western writers and scholars have criticized artists of Asian ancestry working in America for embracing the interests and aesthetic sensibilities of the Occident instead of reviving and preserving their own heritages and artistic traditions. However, artists of Asian ancestry have participated in American art in many different ways, creating works that resist categorization under the rubric of a foreign or exotic identity, whether in subject matter or style.' Our understanding of modernism is expanded. To modernism's critique of the dominant value system is added a prerogative of individual subjectivity. The explication of the artists' subjectivities as cultural, socio-historical and contingently constituted is at the first instance useful to contextualise specific works and but importantly, it overcomes the cultural opacity that tends to envelope discussions of modernism as an arts discourse in Europe and North America.

While the catalogue deploys 'Asian-American' to define and designate a specific territory of works, it does not use either identity or geographic location as a rigid, unified or homogenous category. In her catalogue essay The Search for Roots, or Finding a Precursor, Karin Higa states, "Race, national identity, and the modern maybe the encompassing framework, but the most captivating works in the exhibition resist attempts to fix their meanings. One of the great contributions of Shifting Currents is that it recovers much significant art that has been lost from sight. But the disjunctions produced by seeing this work anew are as important as the clear-cut connections, for they point to both the possibilities and insufficiencies of an 'Asian-American' framework." Experiences of migration, displacement and disjuncture underpin the works included in the catalogue. A distinct form of subjectivity emerges that is interstitial and its expression of 'native traditions' exceeds how those traditions are projected in the Asian context. Within the Asian-American as indeed any migratory context 'tradition' gets evoked through strategies of disorientation and juxtaposition that is at odds with the neat normative discourses surrounding 'tradition.'

The catalogue is divided into six sections that span a range of themes including 'Urban Life and Community', 'Ink and Line', 'War and Peace.' Two sections 'Philosophy and Religion' and 'Nature and Sexuality as Abstraction' are particularly striking. Both sections boldly delve into territories that are difficult because they are available to be appropriated most easily, in reductive terms, within the postcolonial nationalist context. The works included in these sections provide a critical take surrounding these themes through a vocabulary that catapults the liberal and esoteric philosophical principles underpinning the works to an internationally accessible and experiential dimension. A subtle influence of varied American landscapes -- both elementally and culturally, can be felt across the works. The illustrations in the text certainly do not match the experience of the works themselves, but the careful design of the catalogue, the rigour of the supporting essays and text, and the evocative images of all works make this catalogue a useful historical resource and thoroughly engaging reading.