ONE WAY OR ANOTHER: ASIAN AMERICAN ART NOW EXHIBITION CONTINUES NATIONAL TOUR

The critically acclaimed traveling exhibition, One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, will open at the Japanese American National Museum on Sunday, February 10, 2008, as part of its national tour. Featuring 17 contemporary artists selected by a team of three curators, this exhibition, which runs through May 4, was organized by Asia Society, New York. The New York Times called the show the Asia Society's "best foray into contemporary art."

The exhibition title is derived from the 1978 hit song by Blondie, which suggests a diverse way of making or seeing art. One Way or Another displays the willingness of the featured artists to choose, manipulate and reinvent different kinds of languages and issues, whether formal, conceptual, or political. In contrast, in 1994, Asia Society assembled Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, the organization's first major show featuring Asian American artists primarily examining and wrestling with their immigrant experience.

The artists were chosen by a national, three-person team: Susette S. Min, formerly curator at the Drawing Center in New York and now Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies and Art History at University of California, Davis; Karin Higa, Adjunct Curator of Art, Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles; and Melissa Chiu, Director of the Museum and Curator of Contemporary Asian Art, Asia Society.

Higa observed that One Way or Another "takes a heterogeneous approach to artistic practice that defies the notion that there is such a thing as 'Asian American art,' at least one with a shared and cohesive set of formal or conceptual characteristics. Instead, there are Asian American artists from many different places who make different kinds of art."

The current featured artists have cultural roots in China, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United States and Vietnam. The artists are Michael Arcega, Xavier Cha, Patty Chang, Binh Danh, Mari Eastman, Ala Ebtekar, Chitra Ganesh, Glenn Kaino, Geraldine Lau, Jiha Moon, Laurel Nakadate, Kaz Oshiro, Anna Sew Hoy, Jean Shin, Indigo Som, Mika Tajima, and Saira Wasim. Many of the participating artists live in or are otherwise firmly based in three locales: Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Aside from being major arts centers, these regions are also significant population centers of Asian Americans with the attendant resources serving those diverse communities.

"The Japanese American National Museum is honored to be the Los Angeles venue for One Way or Another on its national tour," said Irene Hirano, National Museum President. "By installing this important exhibition at our Museum, it provides another opportunity for us to attract a younger and more diverse audience, something that is vital to all arts and cultural organizations today."

Of this exhibition Chiu observed, One Way or Another presents a fresh generation of artists who have highly divergent points of view and who use a startling array of practices and media. The exhibition captures a particular moment in the American cultural landscape, suggesting new meanings for the 'Asian American' experience."

The traveling exhibition, which was organized by Asia Society in New York City and was on view there in 2006, was shown at the Blaffer Gallery in Houston, Texas and the Berkeley Art Museum in 2007. After its installation at the Japanese American National Museum, the exhibition's national tour concludes at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in the summer of 2008. Each venue features site-specific art by several of the artists.

For this installation, artists Jean Shin, Geraldine Lau and Chitra Ganesh will create original art. Shin will add to her work, Unraveling, which was commissioned for the exhibition and grows and becomes more complicated with each venue. For this installation, this piece will consist of over 180 sweaters collected from members of the Asian American arts community. Shin explains, "For the first part of the project, I asked each of the curators and organizers of this exhibition to donate one of their knitted sweaters. In turn, they have individually invited other artists, museum staff, and members of the Asian American arts community to participate. With each personal request, the project maps a self-defined Asian American arts community." As the title suggests, the sweaters are deconstructed--their strands of yarn unraveled and extended across the gallery space in a colorful network of lines, forming what Shin describes as "a reflection on our connections and the web of relationships we weave through our interactions."

One Way or Another was organized by the Asia Society, New York, with support from Altria Group, Inc., the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, Nimoy Foundation and Asia Society's Contemporary Art Council. It is co-presented by the Asia Society of Southern California with Media Sponsors: Los Angeles Downtown News, LA18 KSCI-TV and The Rafu Shimpo.

Additional Support Provided by: Ernest Y. and Kiyo Doizaki, Mariko Gordon and Hugh Cosman, Thomas and Barbara Iino, Mitsubishi International Corporation Foundation, Kristine Nishiyama and Barry K. Schwebs, Michael W. Oshima and Chiaki Tanaka, PhD, and Deborah Shiba and Gordon Yamate.

THE ARTISTS

A brilliant satirist and conceptualist working in all media, Michael Arcega deftly interprets current political events through parody, visual puns and the use of double entendre. His work Eternal Salivation (2006), a ship held aloft by a pedestal of crates, is a modern retelling of Noah's ark and a reflection on Hurricane Katrina, commenting on the arbitrariness of survival and the challenges raised by global warming and devastating hurricanes and tsunamis.

Xavier Cha was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. Cha works across many disciplines, combining sculpture and costume design with impromptu performance, video and installation. In her video performance work, Human Advertisement Series, she appears in the guise of a shrimp for a sushi restaurant, a giant fingernail for a nail salon, among others, spoofing stereotypical Asian businesses.

Patty Chang is an established video performance artist whose works have been presented in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Her body-based works are often both comedic and disturbing, treading a line between fiction and reality. She has created a new video work, A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West, for the exhibition.

For Binh Danh, who was born in Kien Giang, Vietnam, in 1977, the series of work entitled Life: Dead represents the search for understanding of the Vietnam War. Danh printed portraits of fallen soldiers from the 1969 Life Magazine issue onto leaves "so you can imagine what death might look like when the body decays and the memories remain."

Bird on Flowering Spray, Porcelain Cup, Chieng-lung Period (1736-1750) (2004), is representative of Mari Eastman's decorative art. Primarily a painter using acrylic, vinyl-based paint, oil, spray paint and glitter, she also does sculpture from Sculpey or cement.

Ala Ebtekar's works over the past several years have been profoundly affected by his visits to Iran, which began at the age of nineteen when he returned to his parent's birth land. His first large-scale installation, Elemental (2004), synthesizes the delicacy of Persian miniatures and calligraphy with Iranian coffeehouse painting as well as hip-hop and graffiti cultures in the United States.

Drawing on tales of creation and moral struggle from Hindu, Indian and Greek mythology, as well as from poetic and current event sources, Chitra Ganesh explores scenes and moments neglected in traditional narratives. In mural projects such as Evidence of Past Lives (Jersey City Museum, 2005), 637 Feet of Running Wall (Queens Museum of Art, 2002), and Broken Spell (Wave Hill, 2005), Ganesh combines drawing, assemblage, and washes of color to create fantastical scenes of these re-imagined events. She has created a new site-specific wall painting for the Asia Society exhibition.

Glenn Kaino is a conceptual artist whose work takes on a variety of forms including sculpture, film, painting and online media. In his work Graft (2006), conceived and produced for the present exhibition, he has created a pair of taxidermic animals, a pig and a salmon whose skins have been swapped with those of a cow and a shark, respectively. The dark sutures in the skin reveal the vulnerability of personal "makeovers" and attempts at physical transformation that extend from plastic surgery to race.

East of India reflects two different ideas on Singapore, where artist Geraldine Lau was born. Geographically, areas east of India are where early Chinese immigrants made their way to Singapore. But the work's title also refers to the British mercantile trading entity, the East India Company, which ruled over commerce in India from 1600 to 1858. Lau represents these ideas with a form of cartography and satellite imaging.

Born in Taegu, Korea, Jiha Moon lives in Atlanta, Georgia and her cross cultural influences often collide in her ink and acrylic work, in which her colors are striking. "The blue in the Korean flag always reminded me of Superman's uniform," she once explained, "and the red always reminded me of Wonder Woman's." Many of her forms could be interpreted as either serene or dangerous, reflecting confluences and clashes.

Laurel Nakadate is a photographer and video artist who describes her work as a hybrid of documentary photography and pop culture. Her videos construct narratives through chance encounters with strange men she meets on the street. According to the artist, her work explores themes of voyeurism, exhibitionism, discomfort, loneliness, disconnection, longing, wishing, watching, hostility, gullibility, fear, cunning, slapstick and folly. For this exhibition she has created a new work titled I Want to Be the One To Walk in the Sun (2006, digital video).

For Kaz Oshiro, who was born in Okinawa, Japan, but now lives in Los Angeles, the idea that many objects fill our environment like background noise says something about modern life. Objects like trashcans, kitchen cabinets and household appliances "often become second nature to us and soon we begin to care less about them. I think I am recomposing objects as 'noise' for my environment by using common painter's materials."

Of her work, Anna Sew Hoy writes, "I work by smashing, slapping and cobbling things together by collage. I zoom in on the object and try to give it a new life, realize its potential to be transformed and to achieve new meaning or significance." Hoy, who was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and shares times between New York City and Los Angeles, incorporates Japanese ikebana (flower arranging) ideas to arrange her objects.

In explaining Unraveling, Jean Shin reveals, "I have asked each of the curators (at each new venue) and organizers of this exhibition to donate one of their knitted sweaters. In turn, they have individually invited other artists, museum staff, and members of the Asian American arts community to participate. With each personal request, the project maps a self-defined Asian American arts community." Shin, who was born in Seoul, Korea, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Issues of identity and authenticity are prominent in the work of Indigo Som, who grew up in Marin, California, wondering why so many Chinese restaurants in America feature chop suey, which does not come from China. In her photographic series, Mostly Mississippi: Chinese Restaurants of the South (2004-2005), she captures the juxtaposition of American Chinese restaurants located in racially divided rural towns. Som also works with textiles and paper.

Mika Tajima's art spans installation, sculpture, video, performance, sound, and furniture design in which she "simultaneously employs and subverts particular minimalist and modernist tropes, concepts and design elements." By destabilizing the original intent and meaning of objects and ideas, Tajima reveals the contradictions and uncertainties and then looks at the possibilities they imply.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Saira Wasim explores social and political issues using her miniature paintings as the vehicle for her satire. The New World Order depicts her view that the United States, Great Britain and their allies in the Muslim world create a staged friendship for the Western media. Much of her work focuses on American foreign policy, borrowing other forms such as vaudeville comedy, puppet theater and even the familiar style of Norman Rockwell to make her points.

CATALOGUE

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 128-page catalogue distributed by Yale University Press, with commissioned essays by leading authorities in the field demonstrating the new artistic approaches of this generation of artists. Short entries on each artist including biographies and discussions of their work are also included. The catalogue is available at the Japanese American National Museum store at www.janmstore.com.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

See accompanying document for a list of exhibition-related programs.

ASIA SOCIETY AND ASIA SOCIETY MUSEUM

Asia Society is the leading global organization working to strengthen relationships and promote understanding among the people, leaders, and institutions of Asia and the United States. We seek to enhance dialogue, encourage creative expression, and generate new ideas across the fields of policy, business, education, arts, and culture. Founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Asia Society is a nonprofit educational institution with offices in Hong Kong, Houston, Los Angeles, Manila, Melbourne, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Washington, DC.

One of the first American museums to establish a contemporary Asian art program in the early 1990s, the Asia Society Museum presents groundbreaking exhibitions and artworks previously unseen in the United States. Through these exhibitions and related public programs, the Society provides a forum for the issues and viewpoints reflected in the work of cutting-edge Asian and Asian American artists. Their views do not necessarily reflect those of the nonpartisan Asia Society.

JAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM

The Japanese American National Museum is dedicated to fostering greater understanding and appreciation for America's ethnic and cultural diversity by preserving and telling the stories of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Since its incorporation in 1985, the National Museum has grown into an internationally recognized institution, presenting award-winning exhibitions, groundbreaking traveling exhibits, educational public programs, innovative video documentaries and cutting-edge curriculum guides. The National Museum raised close to $60 million to renovate an historic building in 1992 and open a state-of-the-art Pavilion in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo Historic District in 1999. There are now members and donors representing all 50 states and 16 countries.

GENERAL INFORMATION

The Japanese American National Museum is located at 369 East First Street in the historic Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles. For more information, call (213) 625-0414 or visit www.janm.org. National Museum hours are Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday: 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Admission is $8.00 for adults, $5.00 for seniors; $4.00 for students and children; free for Museum members and children under age six. Admission is free to everyone on Thursdays from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. and every third Thursday of the month from 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.