Amy Kahng

Asian American art history, a nascent, albeit growing field, has focused on unifying aesthetic qualities, politics of representation and how it has been referenced in embodied experience, and markers of foreignness. Asian American history more broadly has been discussed in the context of displacement, internment, immigration, and transnationalism, all terms that implicate the sense of land and place. How can we understand works by Asian diasporic artists in the context of their relationship to land? How can the frameworks of indigeneity, settler colonialism, and global imperialism inform investigating Asian diasporic art practices, and vice versa? This dissertation is the first to examine twentieth-century Asian American artists’ representations of land and landscape. The project focuses on four Asian American artists: Chiura Obata (1885–1975), Bernice Bing (1936–98), Nam June Paik (1932–2006), and Yong Soon Min (b. 1953). Considering Obata’s landscape ink paintings of the American West, Bing’s Abstract Expressionist Bay Area landscapes, Paik’s broadcast television works that feature New York cityscapes, and Min’s mixed media prints of global partition, each artist case study looks at a specific body of work centering land and situates their practice of that period in a distinct moment in American and Asian American art historical narratives. By emphasizing land and landscape, I redirect analysis from discussions related to “hybridity” and multiculturalism to uncover new ways of situating work by Asian American artists alongside discourses of Asian American settler colonialism and global imperialism. Asian American art production in relation to land expands our current knowledge of the twentieth-century formation of global racial relations and the politics of multiculturalism in the United States.