Posts tagged ‘de young museum’
Sound and Vision: Yuan Goang-Ming, Isaac Julian, Ruth Asawa exhibit reviews
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.
Have You Heard The News? Recent Updates
Nick Cheung Ka-Fei shoots straight, The Beast Stalker, 2009
A few quick updates to some previous posts. Nick Cheung Ka-Fei has just won another Best Actor statue (along with co-winner Huang Bo) for his role in The Beast Stalker, this time at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, which is the fancy-schmancy Chinese-language equivalent of the Oscars. Nick’s been cleaning up lately, award-wise, and can add his latest accolade to the Best Actor trophies he garnered at the 2009 Hong Kong Film Awards and the Hong Kong Film Critics’ Society Awards, as well as nods at a bunch of film festivals.
Nick Cheung & Huang Bo, co-Best Actors, Golden Horse Awards, 2009
Nick is a long-time Hong Kong movie vet who started out as a Stephen Chow Sing-Chi wannabe back in the 90s and who has since evolved into an intense and serious actor, most notably in Johnnie To’s crime dramas Exiled and Election 1 & 2. An interesting sidenote: Nick’s been very up front about his struggle with clinical depression, which is kinda cool in the ultra-image-conscious world of Hong Kong cinema.
Pahole Sookkasikon, Mr. Hyphen 2009
As of a couple weeks ago, my homeboy Pahole Sookkasikon is the newly crowned Mr. Hyphen 2009. Sponsored by Hyphen Magazine, the Asian American publication and website, the competition is more than just a beauty pageant—judges look at the entrants’ commitment to community service and dedication to la causa. However, the contest also includes a talent portion and a sleepwear competition, so it’s not only about righteous public service. Pahole left the opposition in the dust with his awesome talent presentation, a mind-blowing Muy Thai/disco diva mashup. He also nailed the Q&A section, giving props to the Asian American sistas who have inspired him as an Asian American male.
In addition to being an activist and artist, Pahole’s a grad student (and my former TA) in SF State’s Asian American Studies Department. This year’s first runner-up, Tony Douangviseth, is also a former SFSU AAS student, so AAS now has official bragging rights to the two smartest, slickest, most dedicated Asian American males in the Bay Area.
Detail of text overlay on poster (concept), Lord, It’s The Samurai, 2009
And asiansart.org, the collective responsible for this summer’s smash hit intervention, Lord, It’s The Samurai, had a little dustup at the deYoung Museum last Friday when they attempted to show artifacts from the project at the museum’s latest Friday night event. Apparently after the group spent most of the afternoon installing its exhibit, at the last minute functionaries from the deYoung severely censored asiansart’s presentation. This took place while the deYoung people were in phone consultation with their counterparts at the Asian Art Museum, which was the hapless target of the original intervention this summer. More details to be found here on their blog, but it sounds like the cabal of museum administrators protected their own interests at the expense of freedom of expression. Not a pretty thing to do to working Asian American artists, especially by an institution that mounted last year’s outstanding show, Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents. Shame on the deYoung for caving to peer pressure at the expense of provocative and important art—I expected better.
Francis Ng’s jawline, with gun, Fierce West Wind
And once again, just because I can, here’s a picture of Francis Ng looking coy, from his upcoming new cowboy flick, Fierce West Wind (aka Four Fantastic Detectives), directed by Gao Qunshu, which is expected to hit screens all over Asia in spring 2010. Gao’s last effort, The Message, was the box office champ over the National Day weekend in China this past October, and one of its stars, Li Bing Bing, took home the Best Actress crown at this weekend’s Golden Horse Awards. An intense little slice of World War II espionage, The Message features patriotism, backstabbing, intrigue, and a healthy dollop of psychosexual torture, including a couple of excruciating scenes of forceful coercion with a smiling and sinister acupuncturist named Mr. Six. It also introduced me to a new favorite actor, the smoking hot Zhang Hanyu, who plays a soldier turned spy. Looking forward to seeing his award-winning turn in Assembly, which should arrive on my doorstep any day now.
Zhang Hanyu burns it up
UPDATE: Pahole Sookkasikon has gone viral in an interview published by the Associated Press about Mr. Hyphen, community service, and Asian American masculinity. Go Pahi!
UPDATE 2: Here’s a video of Pahole’s talent presentation at Mr. Hyphen, which combines Thai martial arts, disco disco, and The Real Housewives of Atlanta. To see Pahole’s amusing introduction go here.
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