For centuries, art history has wheeled and dealed in the myth of the artistic genius solitarily toiling away in the studio. But a number of recent exhibitions have looked at the ways in which networks and communities have been essential to the development of artists and their practices. The latest of these comes in the form of “Scratching at the Moon,” an exhibition that looks at an intergenerational cohort of 13 Asian American artists with deep ties to Los Angeles at the Institute of Contemporary Art in downtown LA.
The exhibition—curated by artist Anna Sew Hoy and ICA director Anne Ellegood, and on view through July 28—is also the first survey to focus on Asian Americans in a mainstream museum in LA, a city that has historically turned its head from focusing on Asian artists, as chronicled in a eye-opening essay by curator John Tain included in the catalog for the show. In her own essay, Sew Hoy attributes her inspiration for the show to that blinkered past as well as the rise in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic and, most importantly, the necessary work of “holding up and naming our community in the hope of bringing our work into focus.” As she writes, “an artist might be an individual working in a studio, but much of our important and joyful work is with and for others.”
Installation view of, clockwise from left Young Chung‘s “Not By Birth” (1996/2023), Yong Soon Min‘s “Defining Moments” (1992), and Min’s Springtimes of Castro and Kim (2009), in “Scratching at the Moon,” 2024, at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Photo Jeff McLane/ICA LA
The threads of the exhibition start in many ways with artist Young Chung, an LA-area mentor whose founding of leading LA gallery Commonwealth and Council in 2010 has left an indelible mark on the city’s art scene but whose own work has…
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