The Brooklyn Rail

Before The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean, curated by Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael, work from the Asian diaspora had not been part of the exhibition program at the Americas Society, which has been dedicated to exhibiting art from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada since the mid-1960s. In this show, a dialogue among thirty artists’ works in sculpture, painting, photography, video, installation, and conceptual art highlights references to Eastern culture and philosophy, social marginalization, being visible and invisible, materiality and immateriality, and crossing cultures. Focusing on the demographic heritage of the artists gives us insight into the experience of Asian people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Members of a diaspora can experience a sense of displacement and nostalgia for the familiar, the loss of community and conflict about cultural assimilation. They may also experience the pressure to code-switch, or to translate their cultural practices for others while embodying a cultural heritage disconnected from the present. To cope, members of a diaspora may fiercely preserve their home culture or conversely, or disassociate from the inherited culture, enduring prejudice and injustice from society while trying to build a better life.

The earliest work in the exhibition is from the post-war period, Ici sur la terre [Here on Earth], (1955) by Afro-Spanish-Chinese Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. There are examples of post-war gestural and calligraphic early abstractions such as by Japanese-Argentine painter Kazuya Sakai’s Obra n. 1 (1959), paintings and photographs from the 1980s (the strongest in the show), and an array from the twenty-first century. Untitled (1987) by New York-based Chinese artist Ching Ho Cheng (born in Cuba) is a jewel. Alchemical experiments with iron oxides, pigments, water, and oxidation on paper accentuate the sublime materiality of the surprising passages of red, copper, yellow, gray and orange with an appearance to sun-drenched rusted iron. The rough topographic surfaces and ripped edges of two pieces of paper carrying the weight of these materials are arranged in a simple composition. It reminds us of paper’s strength, fragility, and penchant for deterioration. The metaphor of paper as skin or a body, has both the capacity to be punctured, scarred, or burned, but also to heal. Mario N. Ishikawa’s three poetic paintings from the “Smoke” drawing series (1984, 1987, and 2000) use air as a medium with the soot from a flame, tiptoeing with capturing the ephemeral and the invisible. Air replaces water and thus revisits the centuries-old Sumi-e tradition where the artist is the vessel and carries a life force through ink and brush interpreting the written word or the natural world. Though it parallels Yves Klein’s performative and violent fire paintings from the 1960s, Ishikawa’s drawings orient his gesture and flame in a playful caress recalling spiral motions from cloud formations. He grew up on rural Brazilian farmlands where being attuned to the sky was crucial as rain equated to the harvest’s survival. Working on farms was a unifying experience of challenges in most Latin American and Caribbean countries for immigrants of Asian descent as they were often contracted to work as farm labor on arrival.

The global expansion of European colonial empires, beginning in the fifteenth century, was made possible by the violent oppression of Indigenous people and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The story of the Asian diaspora in the Americas is closely tied to the abolition of slavery, which produced a need for agricultural workers to keep the economy and trade going. In the late nineteenth century, many Asian countries (notably Japan, China, Korea, India, and Pakistan) experienced dire economic crises affecting the agricultural industry, and changes in the political alliances resulted in a large migration toward the Americas to find the means to a better life.

The fluctuations between appearance and disappearance, and visibility and invisibility, is specific to the experience of the Asian diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean and is at the core of this curatorial filament. A powerful black and white photograph by Albert Chong, Natural Mystic (1982), gives human form to these multi-layered associations. Invisibility relates to Eastern philosophies and spiritual practices of effacing the individual in favor of the collective and/or honoring the immaterial presence of ancestors or ghosts in daily life through rites and objects. Invisibility is both a chosen way of being, but also one imposed by society through methods of omission and prejudice resulting in undesired experiences of being unseen. The photograph’s central figure is masterfully caught between flesh and ghost; the chair serving as support no longer carries weight. Now a still life next to coconut shells, a planted tree, and perhaps symbols of mystic rites is set against a backdrop of natural fiber, recalling the unforgettable hardships lived through life as an agricultural labor. The silence emanated through this image is in stark contrast to the conceptual work by Korean-Venezuelan artist Suwon Lee whose Time to be Invisible (2021) humorously captures the chameleon experience of code-switching. If there were a piece titled “time to be oneself,” the poignant photograph Foto Yura I (2022) by Japanese-Brazilian artist Alice Yura explores the tensions between discomfort and acceptance in appearances and expectations within her family in this multi-generational portrait. She is visible, seated, poised, stoic, and obedient as her fully trans-feminine self, wearing a bright, flowing red dress, while her father, a second-generation cis-male studio photographer, takes her portrait and sees her. We witness this triangulation through her grandfather’s dated image that hangs on the studio wall; he looks over this scene, in contrast, dressed in a black suit, the classic masculine markers of Western success.

There is a conversation between the sculptural table works by contemporary artists Cecile Chong (Chinese-Ecuadorian) and Caroline Ricca Lee (Chinese-Japanese Brazilian). In the former, three abstracted figurine-like sculptures made of tree bark coated in yellow-white wax form an amorphic horn-like head that looks straight at us like sunflower soldiers, while Lee’s ceramic and textile objects are made to be similarly handheld in scale. Stylized figures of an elderly woman are carved into flat clay echoing a Venus of Willendorf votive. The inner layers of Lee’s sandwich sculpture, Veter [Pour] (2022) are composed of old fabric cut and folded to size from clothing belonging to Lee’s grandmother. The white vinyl text on the gallery’s white wall of Wherever the Ocean Waves Touch (2024) by Chinese-Japanese-Peruvian artist Sandra Nakamura is an excerpt from a Chinese poem that imagines this contrast between distance, closeness, visibility and invisibility. The relationship between a diaspora and water as a means of migration is felt in Esvin Alarcón Lam’s video, Apparition (Dragon Piece) (2017). (Lam is based in Guatemala.) He swims nude against waves wearing just a Chinese dragon’s head, as he embodies this mythological creature’s transformative powers. We feel, vicariously through his performance, the wetness on his skin; we hear the meditation of waves and feel the desire to connect with what separates continents. To appreciate the simple abstract compositions within the frame and the infinite expanse of water, the piece would’ve deserved a larger screen. Yuli Yamagata’s Leftover Ikebana (2023) sculpture is a complex mixture of humor, kitsch, and dystopia. The image of the elegant and refined art of flower arranging and Japanese cuisine have been hit by a playful hurricane where discipline, spirit, and beauty is swept away in place of a rectangular form made of recycled cardboard boxes covered in white plaster and acrylic paint, which holds a tall bamboo staff impaling a resin preserved corn cob. Part soldier, part mountain, part platform, a mysterious combination of microwavable food containers and decrepit flowers sit atop as if it were a lighthouse looking out to sea.

The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean has given New York a taste of what could eventually be the foundation for a more expansive exhibition of Latin American and Caribbean Asian diaspora artists at a museum giving more depth to the historic context and timeline of work coming from this demographic group, but also how the work may relate to other artists from the same time periods. In this exhibition we can acknowledge and feel some of the influences specific to the Asian diaspora, and the importance to make these known, as they often have been historically omitted from institutional exhibitions, history books, criticism, and collections. Ultimately it would greatly serve the work to understand it within the context of other art and ideas being exchanged across the Americas, as artists have generally always crossed borders while institutions and the market have dictated who gets to be seen and considered important.