Moderators:

Margo Machida
May Joseph

Commentators:

Faye Ginsburg
Ella Shohat
John Kuo Wei Tchen

Speakers:

Meena Alexander ÷ A Place Without Memory
Debora Aoki ÷ A Nice Japanese Girl
Genara Banzon ÷ The Economics of Love
Monica Chau ÷ Translation and Representation
Priti Darooka ÷ Portrait of a Woman
Hanh Thi Pham ÷ Identity as Process
 

Moderators

Margo Machida is a New York-based painter, independent curator, and writer specializing in Asian American visual art. She has lectured extensively at universities, art schools, museums, and art galleries across the United States and Canada. Presently, she is co-editing Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Asian American Issues in the Contemporary Visual Arts, a major anthology for the University of California Press.

E-mail Margo Machida

May Joseph is an Assistant Professor in Performance Studies at New York University. She is the author of Performance of Citizenship (1998), co-editor of Performing Hybridity (1998), and guest editor of a special issue of Women and Performance entitled New Hybrid Identities. She has published in African American Review, Oxford Literary Review, Movement Research Journal, Praxis, and The Blackwell Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. Her fellowships and awards include a Ford Foundation Grant, Rockefeller Fellowship at the Asian/American Center, CUNY, Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is on the editorial boards of Cultural Studies, and The Journal of Sports and Social Issues.

E-mail May Joseph

Commentators

Faye Ginsburg directs the Center for Media, Culture, and History at NYU, where she is also a professor in the Department of Anthropology. Her research over the last 15 years has been concerned with cultural activism, with a particular focus on gender. Currently, she is writing a book, Mediating Culture, based on the work of indigenous media makers and the ways in which their efforts are shifting the visualization of culture.

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Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor of Cinema Studies and Women's Studies at the City University of New York. She is the author of Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation and the co-author (with Robert Stam) of the award-winning Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. Shohat serves on the editorial boards of Social Text, Public Culture, and Critique. She is co-editor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, her edited volume of essays and visuals, is forthcoming from New Museum and MIT Press.

John Kuo Wei Tchen is a historian and cultural activist. He is the founding director of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program and Institute at New York University and co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in the Americas. His forthcoming book is New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism in the American Quest for Life, Liberty, and Luxuries, 1776-1882. In 1991, he wa awarded the Charles Frankel Prize by the National Endowment for the Humanities for his work in public history.

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Artists
 

A Place Without Memory

Meena Alexander is a novelist, poet and critic who has particular interest in questions of art and migration. Her most recent work includes The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996), a volume of poems entitled River and Bridge (1996), and the novel Manhattan Music (1997). She is also Professor of English and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center, and Hunter College, CUNY.

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Alexander explained that, as a writer who was born in India, raised in North Africa and currently residing in the New York City, her work was deeply informed by questions of geography, of memory, and of nostalgia for a landscape which may never have really existed, a landscape which could function as a true home for her and which would provide her with a language in which she could name herself and author her own history. ãWhat becomes of memory when one crosses borders? What one remembers, and how one needs to use remembrance changes, because memory is functional. I guess one of the things about what weâre doing here is to try to give voice to the work, images, experiences, that are really Îcrossed outâ by the places in which we live. They donât have a place to come out.ä In one story, Alexander described an autobiographical encounter that occurred during her childhood in Khartoum. In the story, an old man exhorted a young girl to, ãÎCome and learn the great languages of the earth. Unless you learn, who will speak your name? How will you know yourself?âä Alexander explained the import of this passage, ãI think it is the pain of no one knowing my name that drives me to write. That, and the sense that Iâm living in a place where I have no history; where all that I am is surface. In Manhattan, I am a Îfissuredâ thing, a body crossed by fault lines. Where is my past? What is my past to me? Here, now, at the edge of Broadway, is America a place without memory?ä

A Nice Japanese Girl

Debora Aoki is a third generation Japanese-American visual artist living and working in Hawaii. Her solo exhibitions include "Recent (and not so recent) Work" (1993), "Cherry Blossom Queens and Half-Baked Dreams" (1993), "Sticks and Stones" (19930, and "Recent Prints and Current Obsessions" (1991). She has also participated in a number of group exhibitions, most recently "Facing Forward, Art of the Female Body" (1994) and "The Printer's Art" (1994). Aoki has been awarded a Lace Artists Projects Grant, a Purchase Award, and an Outstanding Printmaking Student Award from the University of Hawaii. Her work is included in the public collections of the Honolulu Academy of Art, The Contemporary Museum, and the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.

Aoki created a show called ãCherry Blossom Queens and Half-Baked Dreamsä to commemorate the traditional Japanese holiday of Girls' Day in an untraditional way. Aoki explained that the Cherry Blossom Queen Pageant for Japanese-American girls is part of the annual Cherry Blossom festival in Hawaii. Each year, as the time of the pageant approached, posters of the girls participating in the pageants would appear around town, including certain biographical details about the contestantsâ lives. Aoki produced humorous parodies of the posters, and printed them on baseball cards. These cards were contextualized within a larger exhibit which also included a series of drawings exploring what it means to grow up a a "Japanese-American Princess" in Hawaii, and a display of dolls dressed in see-through kimonos housed in glass cases. ãDolls can represent women, so these dolls are all naked women wearing translucent kimonos representing the essential self. They open your culture, but that doesnât hide who you really are.ä Collectively, the three components of the exhibit allowed Aoki to explore the possibilities of gender in contrast to the limited representations of girls embodied in the Cherry Blossom Pageant, Girlsâ Day, and Japanese-American culture at large. "Although I am, at heart, a 'nice Japanese girl,' I felt the need to say something about what that means to me: that it's sometimes frustrating to be told to repress my anger, to hold in my emotions, and to put the needs of others first just to fit in. I've gained a lot from my ethnic heritage, but I felt that the time was right to poke some fun at it, and maybe expand the definition of what it's like to be a Japanese-American woman in Hawaii today."

The Economics of Love
 

Genara Banzon is an installation and mixed-media artist and a graduate of the University of the Philippines School of Art and the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. She has exhibited in the United States, Australia, Japan, and the Philippines. Through innovative integration of local materials, she comments on contemporary life issues while interweaving personal narrative with evidence of migrancy and dispersion. She will be the Artist-in-Residence at the School of Art at Louisiana State University during the Spring of 1998.
E-mail Genara Banzon

Banzon focuses on ãbasic ideasä in her artwork, ideas which she believes are very important, those of ãrespect, dignity and justice that start with the individual and are, of course, protected in the larger society. I talk about my Îjoiningâ as an individual and as part of society. I talk about art processes and art making, and I talk about community, education and communication.ä Audience perception of her work also plays a critical role in its production, for Banzon recognizes that ãin communications, itâs very important to establish common ground. I thought about Gauguin because I found it interesting that there was this person who came from the West and went to the East, to the Pacific, and brought images back to the West about what the tropics were. For me thatâs a very interesting idea, because now Iâm in the West, and Iâm somehow bringing things form my past here, images that I have to deal with. Itâs almost like this idea of who I am from a perspective of how I look at people here and how I bring these images from home.ä Banzon believes that this perspective not only informs her art, but her own understanding of herself and of Philippine society. In her ãmail order bride exhibitions,ä for example, Banzon created images of women of who occupied a variety of different positions in Philippine society, and she included herself among these women. In producing the work, she realized that it not only helped her examine her position as a woman in the Philippines, but also to explore political and economic conditions in her native country.ãand Iâm finding this all out because Iâm away from home.ä

Translation and Representation

Monica Chau is a mixed media installation artist, curator and writer who was born in Houston, Texas. She utilizes photography and digital media processes in her work to explore issues of history, labor, and memories of the past. The juxtaposition of text and image forms a central feature of her art, as she uses this strategy to comment upon the process of looking and being looked at, both as an Asian-American and a woman. She frequently collaborates with artist Daniel Mirer. Chau has been a faculty member in the Department of Digital Imaging at the International Center for Photography. Previously, she has taught at the University of California-Irvine, the American Film Institute, and New York University's Tisch School for the Arts.

Monica Chau creates large-scale installation works in which she grapples with a ãsense of displacement and alienation·this question of homeland.ä She described how the issue of naming is a constant ãthread in my work, because Iâm·looking for a way to translate the Chinese language, which do not speak, read or write. So I use English as a way to look at issues of fragmentation, but also to reclaim an identity that is fractured, in a sense, because I tend to think of English as a fractured language that Iâve had to incorporate, but that is displaced from my real homeland.ä Chau explained that she began to examine representations of Asian women ãas an unconscious way of trying to connect to a sense of belonging as part of a process of trying to define who I was. Itâs about not being able to speak or to name who you are, but it's also about constructing a certain kind of past which I never felt I could enter into. So Iâm trying to set up this situation where I reveal similarities in upbringing, but also vast differences, and trying to unpack this question of otherness, which feels like a rhetorical question.ä

Portrait of a Woman

Priti Darooka was born and brought up in a middle class Hindu family in Bombay, India. In 1989, she joined Pratt Institute in New York for a MFA. She now lives and works in New Jersey. In 1995, she curated a national show, Knowing Her Place, which was exhibited in Seattle. Her work was recently published in Present Tense, the 20th anniversary edition of Calyx. She has shown her work in a number of galleries in the US including the World Bank Art Society, the Steinbaum & Krauss Gallery, the Penelope Loucas Gallery, the Kings County Art Gallery, the Patricia Wismer Center for Women.  Darooka's work has also been exhibited at Art Heritage in New Delhi, and has been featured featured in a Washington DC show entitled A Woman's View: Equality, Development and Peace, as well as in disORIENTED: Shifting Identities of Asian Women at the Henry Street Settlement in New York City. Priti strongly believes in community outreach programs and has always actively supported them. She just got back from a four month trip to rural Rajasthan, the western desert state in India, where she worked on a number of social issues with a primary focus on girl child education awareness. Priti's slides have been selected for the Women of Color Slide Project for the Women's Caucus for Art's 1997 conference. in Philadelphia. She was invited for a summer residency at Blue Mountain Center.
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Priti Darooka uses self-portraits as a vehicle to investigate questions of her identity÷ãidentity as an artist, identity as a female, identity as an Indian in America. Where do I stand? How do I legitimize my existence, my background, my culture? And what is my role as an artist in this global society.ä She explained that her experience as an immigrant to the United States made her acutely conscious of her own culture and background, not only in terms of her own perceptions about Indian culture, but also with respect to ãWestern stereotypesä about what it means to be an Indian female. In the 1992 mixed media work Bride, Darooka alludes to the illegal but nonetheless prevalent custom among many Hindus known as bride burning. Through this work, Darooka does more than simply address her own concerns about the persistence of exploitation and abuse of women in India and her recognition that she could have suffered a similar fate had she remained in India. She also uses the work to interrogate Western preconceptions about women's experiences in Indian culture. ãIâm more aware of my ÎIndiannessâ now than I ever was, and in order to understand my culture, I make myself the subject of my art. In order to find my identity, Iâm trying to understand my background, my culture, and my society better. By expressing personal fear, anger, and frustration about my life, I want to have answers to questions about my religion, my country, my background, so I can exist as an individual and not just an Indian female in America.ä

Identity as Process

Hanh Thi Pham is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Vietnam. She is a nonconformist. She has identified herself as transgendered. Her work is photographic, oral, and autobiographic.

Hanh Thi Pham spoke of her experience of identity as fluid and dynamic. ãIt is very difficult to be an American, in the United States, being a Vietnamese. Sometimes you want to take off your yellow skin, sometimes you want to take off certain masks. This is something that has to do with my study of self, being both male and female on the inside. I find the degree or the intensity of the genders embedded within me.ä Hanh also addressed the particular difficulties she has encountered as a lesbian within the Vietnamese community. ãI think it is a difficult task to say who you are as a woman. Even the fact of being a lesbian is something that is, I think, very dangerous for an Asian woman, because you can be easily persecuted. Homophobia is not only 'out there' in society, but within families, and homophobia is an internalized process also. Therefore, I perfectly had to transform myself.  I often think there is a need to write on my body.  I reconstruct my identity by using my body as a page.ä Consequently, Hanhâs work often takes the form of self-portraits, but these self-portraits reflect and act out the fluidity of her identity, while simultaneously interrogating Hanhâs relationship with other womenâs experiences that paralleled her own. ãMy work is very autobiographical, but also not that autobiographic, because I donât see myself all the time. I see other women being and having similar or very close experiences to what I have in this life.ä

Artists and Their Work:  Session I

Artists and Their Work:  Session II

Conversations:  Themes and ideas emerging from the conference

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