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Entropic Designs: A Review of Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes and Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970 at the de Young Museum
Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes. Organized by the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, April 22-September 3, 2006; Contemporary Museum, St. Louis, September 7-December 30, 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, March 29-June 30, 2008; de Young Museum, San Francisco, October 25, 2008-January 18, 2009; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 14-July 12, 2009. Curated by Richard Andrews.
Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970. Organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Asian American Art Project at Stanford University, October 25, 2008-January 18, 2009. Curated by Daniell Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson.
"Forty years ago there were no Asian Americans."1 This puzzling and provocative opening statement made by professors Gordon Chang and Mark Dean Johnson in the catalog of the exhibition Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970 (A/A/M) is explained in the next sentence by the historical acknowledgment that the term Asian American was not claimed until 1968: a panethnic collectivity, reappropriated as a sign of resistance within the context of the Asian American movement. The statement is key to understanding why many of the artists featured in this landmark exhibition did not identify as "Asian American," nor did they consequently categorize, describe, or mark their art with that label.
The exhibition reifies, but also challenges, the expectations of an exhibition titled Asian/American/Modern Art with seven subheadings: Looking Both Ways, War and Peace, Urban Life and Community, Philosophy and Religion, Nature, Sexuality as Abstraction, and lastly Ink and Line. The exhibition consists of five large rooms in which the themes are introduced on wall texts. Next to each work is a description of the work or an anecdote about the artist. For example, in the War and Peace section, works of art in an array of different styles from figurative to abstract expressionism are presented that document the various wars of the twentieth century-World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War-that depict the effects of war on everyday life, and/or that are commentaries on the fear of racial violence, modern warfare, and nuclear annihilation. The exhibition opens with Looking Both Ways, a selection of artworks that highlight the East-West alliance, showing the...