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Envisioning diaspora : Asian American visual arts collectives : from Godzilla, Godzookie to the Barnstormers

Asian American modern art : shifting currents, 1900-1970

This beautifully illustrated volume, companion book to the exhibition of the same name, presents the first comprehensive survey of work produced by artists of Asian descent in America during the first seven decades of the twentieth century. Featuring examples across many media and extending beyond ethnicity, "Asian/American/Modern Art" brings into focus an underrepresented and vital group within American art. Introduced by historian Gordon H. Chang and cocurator Mark Dean Johnson, with contributions by cocurator Daniell Cornell and Karin Higa, Sharon Spain, and ShiPu Wang, the book follows the exhibition's multiethnic and multidisciplinary approach.Rather than defining an Asian American art aesthetic, "Asian/American/Modern Art" highlights the stylistic tensions and artistic influences apparent in the work of major artists including Chiura Obata, Yun Gee, Ruth Asawa, Isamu Noguchi, Nam June Paik, and Carlos Villa. Two areas of emphasis, the modernist matrix of the early twentieth century and the post-World War II period wherein artists developed new approaches, support the book's recurring themes of war and peace, urban life and community. This powerful book represents a major rewriting of American art history to include a population of artists whose significant contributions to twentieth-century American art have been, until now, largely ignored.

Unsettled visions : contemporary Asian American artists and the social imaginary

In "Unsettled Visions" the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of Asian American visual art. Machida focuses on works produced during the watershed 1990s, when surging Asian immigration had significantly altered the demographic, cultural, and political contours of Asian America, and a renaissance in Asian American art and visual culture was well underway. Machida conducted extensive interviews with ten artists working during this transformative period: men and women of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese descent, most of whom migrated to the United States. In dialogue with the artists, Machida illuminates and contextualizes the origins and intent behind bodies of their work. "Unsettled Visions" is an engaging look at a vital art scene and a subtle account of the multiple, shifting meanings of 'Asian-ness' in Asian American art. Analyses of the work of individual artists are grouped around three of the major themes that Asian American artists engaged with during the 1990s: representations of the other; social memory and trauma; and migration, diaspora, and a sense of place. Machida considers the work of the photographers Pipo Nguyen-duy and Hanh Thi Pham, the printmaker and sculptor Zarina Hashmi, and installations by the artists Tomie Arai, Ming Fay, and Yong Soon Min. She examines the work of Marlon Fuentes, whose films and photographs play with the stereotyping conventions of visual anthropology, and a series of prints in which Allan deSouza examines the centrality of Orientalism to American popular culture. Machida reflects on Kristine Aono's museum installations embodying the effects of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and on Y. David Chung's representations of urban spaces transformed by migration in works ranging from large-scale charcoal drawings and installations to a multimedia 'electronic rap opera'.

Online Duke University Press

Asian American Studies

Stanford Libraries' American History collections include print and online materials for the study of American history, and extensive photographic, archival, and rare books collections.