Why is ‘The Asian’ so white? Receipts for Today’s NY Times Article

NY Times Article

This came out in today’s NY Times: Asian Art Museum to Remove Bust of Patron. That’s Just a Start, by Carol Pogash.

The Times’ article takes the Asian Art Museum’s bust of Nazi sympathizer Avery Brundage as a point of departure to explore the museum’s checkered past in light of their director’s recently initiated #BLM PR campaign. The museum was originally founded around white supremacist Brundage’s largely unprovenanced collection.

 

 

A Compelling Response

Please see “Hoodless and Institutionalized” by artist Chiraag Bhakta, aka Pardon My Hindi.  Bhakta’s work has been featured on this blog twice previously.

Correction to the Times:  Brundage Tortilla Art (2012)

We’d like to offer one correction:  In the Times, Director Jay Xu claims to only have become aware of Brundage’s white supremacist history as recently as 2016.  However, longtime subscribers to this blog might recall that back in 2012, we created edible tortilla art featuring a graphic of Brundage as severed Buddha head (left) that was distributed to museum-goers along with the informational flyer below.

Flyers were distributed discreetly to AAMSF visitors throughout a Matcha event in 2012

We also blogged in 2015 about how Brundage’s racist roots can be traced back to his presidency of an Aryan fraternity in his college days. 

Who was Avery Brundage?

Receipts for the White Gaze

Since one of us is quoted several times in the article, we’d like to provide a few receipts.

“Historically, at this institution, there’s been a white gaze defining what ‘Asia’ means,” said Scott Tsuchitani, an Asian-American artist.

Mr. Tsuchitani, the artist, objected to the racial impact of the culture of the museum. He said that over many years, the museum has exhibited “a pattern of repeatedly exoticizing, hypersexualizing, playing dress up with Asian cultures.”

Receipts linked below:  (just a sampling)

• Exoticizing
• Hypersexualizing
• Playing “Dress-Up” with Asian Cultures
  • Maharajah
  • Yoga:  WhitePeopleDoingChanting
  • Samurai:  1, 2
• Not to mention:  Exhibiting Stolen Goods while Censoring Where They Came From

Why is ‘The Asian’ So White:  a problem of positionality

If the Asian Art Museum

• was founded by white people around the mostly unprovenanced collection of a white supremacist, and
• white people have remained in key positions of power on both board and management throughout its history, and
• in 2020, white staff outnumber Asians by roughly 2:1, Latinx by 4:1, and Blacks by 7:1,

then what steps can we expect the museum to take as it scrambles to declare support for Black Lives Matter and professes to reckon with a history so fraught with whiteness?

We as an institution have not done enough. We must take action and become the change we wish to see in the world.

While the museum has begun to denounce Brundage’s racism, it has not accounted for its own cultural capitalization of the racist’s ill-gotten collection.  If the collection at the heart of “The Asian” is a product of U.S. imperial violence in Asia, then what is the nature of the museum’s positional relationship to Asia and local Asian American communities?

If a white institution is knowingly in possession of goods stolen from Asia, then what is the obvious action that must be taken to “become the change we wish to see in the world”? Relocating the imperialist’s bust or removing his name from museum initiatives offers nothing in the way of either restitution or meaningful corrective action at a structural level.

Welcome to “The Caucasian”

The same racial logic that would capitalize on a racist’s collection of stolen goods  underwrites, for example, the transformation of the relatively innocuous “Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection” into a hypersexualized “Seduction” opening, complete with performers (and staff?) in yellowface.  Over time, practices such as these have repeatedly served to center whiteness by racializing Asians as foreign Others, in effect functioning as a Caucasian Art Museum that extracts racial capital from Asian cultures and bodies.

This pattern of symbolic violence implicitly shares an underlying racial logic in common with that of the late Nazi sympathizer himself.  It will take more than public forums and incremental hires to fundamentally change an operational common sense that continues, even now, to defend its history of whiteness in the face of criticism from Asian American voices.

Talk is cheap and implicit bias trainings are limited, so here’s a proposition.  What can we learn from the dramatic transformation unfolding all around us? Rather than framing this through a lens of liberal reform, how might we apply the radical logics of abolition and decolonization to remake this institution in a way that centers the needs, voices, and perspectives of the very communities whose cultures are on display?

In closing, we return to Bhakta’s “Hoodless and Institutionalized“:

If the museum wants change, the change needs to be radical, and the structure can’t remain. To start, the current leadership needs to step down. White people in high positions in the education, curatorial, PR, and other departments need to step down. White people on the board should step down…

Must Read: “The Whitewashing of #WhitePeople Doing Yoga”

On the eve of the opening of his “Why You So Negative?” solo exhibition at Human Resources LA, artist Chiraag Bhakta offers an op-ed on the whiteness of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s appropriation of his artwork about the whiteness of the appropriation of yoga titled #WhitePeopleDoingYoga.

Chiraag Bhakta, “The Whitewashing of #WhitePeopleDoingYoga,” Mother Jones, October 17, 2019.

Supporting Essays
Occupying Negative Space by Anuradha Vikram
Keeping it “Real” by Vivek Boray
Our Complicity With Excess by Vijay Iyer

The installation as it appeared at the Asian Art Museum in 2014.  Photos by the author.

Watch whiteness work:  some choice pull quotes from the op-ed:

During our initial meetings at the museum, they told me to “turn down the volume” of my critique. They also insisted I remove a section of the installation—a Hindu-inspired shrine featuring photographs of a white couple as South Asian gurus. “This might be offensive to Indian people,” staffers said—white authorities telling me what Indian people might find offensive.

From the museum’s response:

According to a museum spokesperson, Bhakta was told that the phrase “white people” could be “offensive or puzzling” to some. As examples, the spokesperson pointed to “Anglo practitioners of yoga unfamiliar with the concepts of cultural appropriation/appreciation . . .”

Mindblowing how it’s completely acceptable from the museum’s (Anglo) point of view for Anglo practitioners of yoga to appropriate yoga without an awareness of the politics of cultural appropriation—and to invite such white practitioners of appropriation to perform it inside the museum as part of the museum’s public programs—and yet inappropriate for an Indian American artist to raise the issue of appropriation while at the same time wanting to appropriate his work about it.

Detail of #WhitePeopleDoingYoga installation at Asian Art Museum in 2014

Bhakta puts it in context:

Let’s break this shit down: Here were white elites exerting power over Brown critique that was explicitly about white elites exerting power over Brown culture. […] People across the operation, from the marketing department to the education team to the curatorial staff, continued to sterilize my perspective, tiptoeing around me to make themselves feel more comfortable and spare the museum further controversy. Brown critique had to be sanitized for white consumption.

And the mystery:  who is “this unseen figure in the forest“?

Throughout my meetings with curators and educators, there was one person whose name they kept mentioning as an authority calling the shots—the chief curator, also white, an unseen figure in the forest who seemed to be deliberately keeping a distance.

It’s almost as if this shot-calling “collector of South Asia” is completely unaware of his own coloniality of being, almost as if this issue isn’t part of “our daily conversation, among staffers and just inside our own brains … issues of Orientalism, of context, of how much information to provide and what kind, of what kinds of intentional and unintentional interpretive views we might be putting on things,” as he was quoted by the Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker in response to our own intervention a full decade ago.

Now a collector’s item!

One can’t help but admire Bhakta’s fortitude in engaging not only with curatorial coloniality but also the white fragility of our favorite museum marketing chief, who argued that the words “white people” on the merch—already purchased by the museum store from Bhakta—were “offensive” and “out of context”—unlike the isolated word “Asian” emblazoned on the museum’s very own tote bag.

Oh, the cognitive dissonance of white epistemicide!  The “Asian” never stops to consider what Asian Americans find offensive (because, y’know, the subaltern still cannot speak), and when we ever so artfully try to tell them, well . . .  (I’m already warning students to brace themselves for Hallowe’en) . . .

White people watching #WhitePeopleDoingChanting at a 2014 gala celebrating the Asian Art Museum’s “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” exhibition.

Bhakta concludes:

That was it: My experience with the Asian Art Museum was an exercise in watching white people work out their identity on the back of mine. The platform they seemed to give me, it turned out, wasn’t actually for me—it was for them, a way to fashion my Brownness into something they could wear. White supremacy works that way, for all “minorities”; it censors any critique contained in nonwhite expression and commodifies and tokenizes whatever’s left, forcing people like me into the posture of the model minority.

But I’m the negative one, right?

Learn more about Chiraag Bhakta’s work on PardonMyHindi.com. His solo show, “Why You So Negative?,” opened 10/18 and runs through October 27 at Human Resources in Los Angeles, at 410 Cottage Home Street, HumanResourcesLA.com. 

#WhitePeopleDoingYoga @ the Asian Art Museum

Last night I went to check out #WhitePeopleDoingYoga at the First Thursday event at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

#WhitePeopleDoingYoga is an installation by *Pardon My Hindi / Chiraag Bhakta.
On view from March 28th – May 25th.

Kudos to the museum’s education department for exhibiting Bhakta’s project, which is showing in the Education Resource Center in conjunction with the feature exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation.  While I couldn’t find much information about the project on the museum’s website, *Pardon My Hindi posted a video and artist statement here.

Click for more on Chiraag Bhakta

Artist Statement

This piece is a reflection of my personal relationship, as an Indian American, with yoga and its migration to today’s Western context. I call this piece #WhitePeopleDoingYoga, the hashtag symbolizing the commercialization and commodification of a culture.

Not too long before moving to the Bay Area seven years ago, I began to collect grassroots-level meditation and yoga ephemera from the 1960s through the 1980s. During that era, particularly in the Bay Area, yoga started making a big impact on Western culture. I became interested in how yogic practice was being mined and commercialized; how the South Asian face of the discipline was being removed in the branding and portrayal of the practice and culture. Today, an online image search for “yoga” mainly returns images of white people in various poses, followed by images of dogs and cats doing the same.

This project is not about the individual pieces in my collection, but the overall voice that is put out in front of us, which is overwhelming and suffocating to me. After you go through the exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation, you will notice a sharp turn as yoga enters a new level of commercialization in the West. The $27 billion yoga industry in the U.S. has rebranded a complex and rich discipline to make it easier to sell “yoga” as a line of products. Brands like Lululemon and Nike have started appropriating and trademarking phrases, postures, and clothing—aligning and embedding themselves in our understanding of yoga. Simultaneously the South Asian face and voice are relegated to an exotic caricature—cartoons, adoption of South Asian names by Westerners, mystical creatures, Hindu gods. One archival study of the health and wellness magazine Yoga Journal found that over the course of two years “there was never a South Asian person on the cover, and less than one percent of content contributors were South Asian.”1

The act of selectively choosing what works in popular Western contexts, while ignoring aspects of yoga’s core philosophy and historic practice, is telling. It shows an ironic attachment of one’s ego to a desire for ownership over an ancient practice of material denouncement that emerged from an altogether different, South Asian, tradition.

In the end, I feel compelled to draw parallels between the current state of yoga and the industrial colonization by the same dominant voice that now adds another conquest to its collection. Meet the new founders of Yoga™.

—Chiraag Bhakta

1 Roopa Singh, Esq., Archival study for the South Asian American Perspectives on Yoga in America, SAAPYA

#WPDY totebags available at PardonMyHindi.com

Meanwhile upstairs in Samsung Hall, mostly WhitePeopleDoingChanting…