Chaeeun Lee

As the first in-depth study of the politics of abstraction by artists of Asian descent in between Abstract Expressionism and multiculturalism, my dissertation examines a sampling of Asian American and Asian immigrant artists: Bernice Bing, Carlos Villa, Kazuko Miyamoto, and couple Arakawa and Madeline Gins. All of these artists’ work emerged in the 1960s and the 1970s at the juncture between abstract tendencies and socially motivated concerns for race, gender, culture, and identity. By examining the imbrication of formal experiments with interests in materiality (Villa), spirituality (Bing), the gendered/racialized body (Miyamoto and Villa), and language and cultural stereotypes (Arakawa+Gins), I demonstrate how the artists’ varied inquiries into the politics of abstraction and aesthetics problematized established norms of racial, cultural, and gender identification in search of alternative methods of explicating the self and the world. In doing so, I argue that their work points toward a politics of Asian American art beyond the narrow form of identity politics concerned with visibility and recognition.

This fellowship received federal support from the Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center