Asian American Art

Shaped by diverse histories of migration, racialization, cultural exchange, and community formation, Asian American art resists simple definition. This course begins by tracing the visual and material histories that prefigured the formation of Asian American identity, and explores how artists of Asian descent in the US have engaged questions of identity, race, politics, history, community, and aesthetics. Rather than treating Asian American art as a self-evident field, we will ask what the category makes visible or obscures, and how its study might revise established narratives of American art. Topics include early trade networks and chinoiserie, representations of Chinatown, Japanese American incarceration, modernism and abstraction, art and activism, cross-racial encounters, multiculturalism, and contemporary critical theories. Complementing the field’s longstanding emphasis on the West Coast, the course will pay special attention to the histories of Asian American art in New York.Shaped by diverse histories of migration, racialization, cultural exchange, and community formation, Asian American art resists simple definition. This course begins by tracing the visual and material histories that prefigured the formation of Asian American identity, and explores how artists of Asian descent in the US have engaged questions of identity, race, politics, history, community, and aesthetics. Rather than treating Asian American art as a self-evident field, we will ask what the category makes visible or obscures, and how its study might revise established narratives of American art. Topics include early trade networks and chinoiserie, representations of Chinatown, Japanese American incarceration, modernism and abstraction, art and activism, cross-racial encounters, multiculturalism, and contemporary critical theories. Complementing the field’s longstanding emphasis on the West Coast, the course will pay special attention to the histories of Asian American art in New York.