This book challenges existing notions of what is "American" and/or "Asian" art, moving beyond the identity issues that have dominated art-world conversations of the 1980s and the 1990s and aligning with new trends and issues in contemporary art today, e.g. the Global South, labor, environment, and gender identity. Contributors examine both historical and contemporary instances in art practices and exhibition-making under the rubric of "American art in Asia." The book complicates existing notions of what constitutes American art, Asian American (and American Asian) art. As today’s production and display of contemporary art takes place across diffused borders, under the fluid conditions of a globalized art world since transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, new contexts and art historical narratives are forming that upend traditional Euro-American mappings of center-margins, migratory patterns and community engagement. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, American studies, Asian studies and visual culture.

Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is a first-ever survey exploring the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian Ancestry active in the United States before 1970, and features ten essays by leading scholars, biographies of more than 150 artists, and more than 400 reproductions of artwork and photographs of artists, together creating compelling narratives of this heretofore forgotten American art history.

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art takes Asian American differences as its point of departure, and brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. Taken together, these nine original artist interviews, cutting-edge visual artworks, and seven critical essays explore contemporary currents and experiences within Asian American art, including the multiple axes of race and identity, queer bodies and forms, kinship and affect, and digital identities and performances. Using the verb and critical lens of “queering” to capture transgressive cultural, social, and political engagement and practice, the contributors to this volume explore the connection points in Asian American experience and cultural production of surveillance states, decolonization and diaspora, transnational adoption, and transgender bodies and forms, as well as heteronormative respectability, the military, and war. The interdisciplinary and theoretically informed frameworks in the volume engage readers to understand global and historical processes through contemporary Asian American artistic production.

Why Asia?: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art is a ground-breaking investigation into two overlapping and rapidly emerging areas in contemporary art. The book consists of lucid discussions on individual artists, exhibitions and theoretical issues. With over sixty illustrations it serves to introduce the current landscape of Asian and Asian American Art, with essays on art in China, Taiwan and North America, as well as individual essays on leading artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Xu Bing and Michael Joo. Above all, Yang explores the challenges that contemporary Asian and Asian American art poses to artists, critics, curators and viewers alike. In particular, she reflects on the complexities of exhibition practice, the role of identity politics in arts, the unspoken assumptions of Western critics faced with Asian art, and the difficulties faced by artists working between cultures.

Edited by Alexandra Munroe. Text by Vivien Greene, Harry Harootunian, Richard King, Alexandra Munroe, Ikuyo Nakagawa, David Patterson, Kathleen Pyne and D. Scott Atkinson, J. Thomas Rimer, Kristine Stiles, Bert Winther-Tamaki.

In Unsettled Visions, the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of contemporary 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: women and men 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 of and intent behind bodies of their work. Unsettled Visions is an engrossing look at a vital art scene and a subtle account of the multiple, shifting meanings of “Asianness” in Asian American art. Analyses of the work of individual artists are grouped around three major themes that Asian American artists engaged with during the 1990s: representations of the Other; social memory and trauma; and migration, diaspora, and 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 prints in which Allan deSouza addresses the persistence of Orientalism in American popular culture. Machida reflects on Kristine Aono’s museum installations embodying the multigenerational 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 to multimedia installations and an “electronic rap opera.”

Contemporary Asian American artists--with a strong sense of being American and an acute critical consciousness of world matters--grapple with issues of identity in a way that sets them apart from their predecessors. Whereas many Asian American artists of a previous generation directly referred to an Asian sense of self in their works, it can be argued that younger Asian American artists only sometimes make reference to it or omit it entirely. This creatively designed book focuses on recent works by seventeen Asian American artists born in the late 1960s and 1970s--including Patty Chang, Kaz Oshiro, and Jean Shin--to explore this pivotal generation of artists, the prevalent themes in their art, and the different ways they configure identity in their work. One Way or Another features examples of painting, sculpture, and video and installation art--many previously unpublished--and includes essays that discuss the shifting meaning of Asian America over the last decade and address the issues of mixed heritage and the emergence of an evolving Asian American identity in an increasingly globalized society. Distributed for the Asia Society Museum Exhibition Schedule: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California (September 19 - December 23, 2007) Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston (January 20 - March 31, 2007) Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles (February 9 - May 2, 2008) Asia Society and Museum, New York (September 8 - December 10, 2006)

California Dreaming is a multi-genre collection featuring works by Asian American artists based in California. Exploring the places of “Asian America” through the migration and circulation of the arts, this volume highlights creative processes and the flow of objects to understand the rendering of California’s imaginary. Here, “California” is interpreted as both a specific locale and an identity marker that moves, linking the state’s cultural imaginary, labor, and economy with Asia Pacific, the Americas, and the world. Together, the works in this collection shift previous models and studies of the “Golden State” as the embodiment of “frontier mentality” and the discourse of exceptionality to a translocal, regional, and archipelagic understanding of place and cultural production. The poems, visual essays, short stories, critical essays, interviews, artist statements, and performance text excerpts featured in this collection expand notions of where knowledge is produced, directing our attention to the particularity of California’s landscape and labor in the production of arts and culture. An interdisciplinary collection, California Dreaming foregrounds “sensing” and “imagining” place, vividly, as it hopes to inspire further creative responses to the notion of emplacement. In doing so, California Dreaming explores the possibilities imagined by and through Asian American arts and culture today, paving the way for what is yet to be.

This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model-minority myth. Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, these letters ignite new ways of being, and modes of creating, at a moment of racial reckoning.

A defrocked priest embarks on an epic odyssey through the afterlife in search of answers to life's Ultimate QuestionWhat lies Beyond, and what does it hold for humanity? The Knowledge of Good & Evil is an odyssey of one man driven to penetrate the barrier of death and return alive with its secrets... . Ian Baringer has never fully recovered from losing his parents in a horrific accident. Despite the help of Angela Weber, the brilliant psychologist who loves him, he's in the grip of an obsession. He must know for certain if the soul survives death. And incredibly, he's found a way. But trespassing the afterlife unleashes a disastrous chain of events, leaving Ian and Angela but one choice: Defy the gates of heaven and hell to steal a Knowledge hidden from the world since the dawn of creation.