Censored in Japantown!

It’s happened repeatedly, since we first began putting our flyers out last Friday evening:

The heavy hand of Orientalist hegemony apparently knows no limits

We place postcard flyers in the public racks around Japantown, and then a short while later not only do we return to find them all removed, but there are new flyers from the Asian Art Museum in their place.  Coincidence?

This afternoon we tried an experiment, placing a few of their flyers on top of ours, to initially conceal them.  We returned a couple hours later and again not only were all of our flyers removed (which would otherwise be unlikely on a sleepy Monday afternoon when a lot of the businesses are closed), but the few Asian Art Museum flyers from the top of the stacks remained.  And more flyers from the Asian Art Museum had been added.

If that weren’t damning enough, when we shared what had happened with one of the merchants we know, he told us that the Asian Art Museum’s poster guy had just passed through the area.

It’s bad enough when the institution remains willfully oblivious to the community’s needs in their ongoing cultural practices, but for them to come into the community and censor the work of our own artists is simply outrageous.  Stay tuned.