beyondasiaphilia

Sound and Vision: Yuan Goang-Ming, Isaac Julian, Ruth Asawa exhibit reviews

August 5, 2025 at 4:31 am Leave a comment

This year three of the major art museums in San Francisco had toplining shows of contemporary artists of color. While this might seem unremarkable in the 21st century it has in fact been a long time coming, especially here in the Bay. Despite the diverse demographics of the city, SF museums have a bit of a history of not exhibiting contemporary BIPOC artists.

It was so egregious that way back in 2004 and 2009 my pal Scott Tsuchitani staged two interventions at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum pointing out the museum’s lack of support for living contemporary Asian American artists. Both Memoirs of a Sansei Geisha: Snapshots of Cultural Resistance (2004) and Lord, It’s The Samurai (2009) satirically critiqued the AAM’s orientalist tendencies. Since then the AAM has tried to clean up its act, engaging Abby Chen in 2018 as the museum’s head of the department for contemporary art, where she’s booked shows on iconic Asian American artists including Carlos Villa and Bernice Bing.  Most recently Chen has curated the first international show of Taiwanese video artist Yuan Goang-Ming, Everyday War. 

Yuan’s show includes several single-channel pieces that feature everyday tableaux suddenly exploding or bursting into flames, but the piece that riveted my attention was “The 561st Hour of Occupation” (2014). The piece includes a long drone shot of an empty Taipei cityscape, shot during the country’s annual Wan’an air raid drill (萬安演習) where all residents are required to remain indoors for thirty minutes in preparation for any potential attack from China, Taiwan’s bellicose neighbor to the west. Combined with footage from the 2014 Sunflower Movement, where students peacefully occupied Taiwan’s legislative yuan for twenty-four days to protest a controversial Taiwan-China trade agreement. Yuan’s video piece is a reminder of the constant underlying threat of invasion in Taiwan, whether military or economic, from China.

The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park also recently featured the work of filmmaker and artist Isaac Julian, including several installations of his single and multichannel work. I enjoyed the lush, beautifully lit and photographed images from his more recent works that include fictional re-imaginings of historical events. Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022) (31 min) mixes in a bit of Africaphilia, gorgeous black and white cinematography, and a healthy dose of queer looks to critique the complicity of the museum system in colonization and exploitation.

Lessons of the Hour (2019) (28 min), a ten-channel installation starring Frederick Douglass (or rather, a reasonable facsimile), combines Douglass’s oratory, including his famous 4th of July speech, lovely landscapes, and images of ships, sailing and coastlines. As a self-identified sewist I also appreciated the images of Douglass’s wife Anna on her hand-cranked sewing machine industriously stitching away.

SFMOMA was the third of the major-museum triumvirate to topline BIPOC artists this year, with its blockbuster show Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, the first major exhibition of the influential Japanese American sculptor and arts educator. The show features a huge selection of Asawa’s iconic large-scale hanging woven wire sculptures, with the lighting design emphasizing the cast shadows of the pieces. I also appreciated the asymmetrical lozenge shapes of the platforms below the sculptures, underscoring Asawa’s midcentury aesthetic.

I had the privilege of collaborating with Ruth in 2002 on Each One Teach One: The Alvarado School Arts Program, a documentary about her arts education programs in the San Francisco public schools and seeing her show was very pleasurable for me. In addition to her famous wire sculptures the exhibit also includes several of her paintings and drawings as well as information about her many public art pieces throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area. I grew up seeing these public art pieces, including the nursing mermaid at Ghiradhelli Square, the origami fountains in Japantown, the bread-dough cast bronze round fountain at Union Square, and the woven wire medallion at the entrance to the Oakland Museum of California, so it was great to see documentation of those all collected together in one show. 

I had visited Ruth’s house a lot when we worked on the movie together and remember many of her sculptures hanging from the high wooden beams of her living room. The SFMOMA includes a reconstruction of her living room, including the carpet and a facsimile of the chairs, which was a fun thing to see in a museum setting and which underscored the primacy of her family and community in her work. Several of Ruth’s children and grandchildren are working artists and uncounted numbers of children who worked with her and her fellow Alvarado School parents have felt the positive effects of her arts education programs. Along with her iconic woven sire sculptures and her ubiquitous and legendary public arts projects Asawa is truly one of San Francisco’s most important artists and culture workers and it’s great to see her legacy honored with a full-scale retrospective.

Along with the 2020 Dawoud Bey show, last year’s Amy Sherald show, the 2023-24 Pacita Abad retrospective and the current Kara Walker installation at SFMOMA, as well as the 2022 Faith Ringgold show at the de Young, it seems like major institutions in the Bay are finally catching up to the important and groundbreaking work that BIPOC artists have been creating for decades. It’s been a long time coming but hopefully it means that more people of color are entering the art world canon, or perhaps more cynically, that more of their work is becoming commodified. Whatever the reason, it’s good to see San Francisco museums showcasing work from artists that reflect the of city’s population. 

Entry filed under: de young museum, isaac julian, ruth asawa, SFMOMA, Yuan Goang-Ming. Tags: art, artists of color, asian american artists, asian art museum, bipoc artists, contemporary art, de young museum, isaac julian, ruth asawa, SFMOMA, Taiwanese art, Yuan Goang-Ming.