Over the recent Lunar New Year weekend, I attended the opening and panel discussion for the exhibition Scratching at the Moon at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The show is described on the museum’s website as the “first focused survey of Asian American artists in a major Los Angeles contemporary art museum.” In a city with such long-standing, vibrant, Asian-American communities, this assertion seems unbelievable, but it is true. Of course, there are only three or four “major” contemporary art institutions here. Being “first” in such limited company is perhaps not remarkable, but neither is racism in elite cultural institutions.
However narrowly construed, the claim to be “first” minimizes the history of exhibitions of contemporary art by Asian Americans that have been taking place in and around Los Angeles for over 20 years. Shifting Perceptions: Contemporary L.A. Visions was curated by Betty Phoenix Wan Hamada at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in 2000; artists Việt Lê, Yong Soon Min, and curator Leta Ming brought us humor us at the Municipal Art Gallery in 2007; and One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, curated by Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette S. Min, was a traveling exhibition that made a stop at the Japanese American National Museum in 2008. These are just three among many others organized by curators based in Southern California like Kris Kuramitsu, Sonia Mak, Steven Wong, and Rebecca Hall. None of these shows took place in a “contemporary art museum,” but that distinction feels pedantic — contemporary art by Asian Americans has long been an undeniable part of the Los Angeles scene. Although the Scratching opening event nodded to some Asian-American predecessors — the late, much-missed Higa, and the New York-based art collective Godzilla — there was little attempt to situate the show within this history or explain how it reflected or enriched the established discourse around Asian-American art. Must we…
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