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…

Justice for Pvt. Danny Chen rally in NYC today

UPDATE (8/17/12) – Links to event photos, taken 8/11/12.

Speakers included community leaders, family member, a number of NY City Councilpersons, and the City Comptroller:
https://picasaweb.google.com/109077540544836974769/JusticeForPvtDannyChen
The following link, to Asian American Art Centre, includes photos from a mid-July rally, in addition to last week’s:
http://artspiral.blogspot.com/2012/08/danny-chen.html

Original Post:

JUSTICE FOR PVT. DANNY CHEN RALLY
Columbus Park
Bayard and Mulberry Sts.

2pm Saturday, August 11, 2012

Earlier this month, a jury of military personnel found Sgt. Adam Holcomb not guilty of the most serious charges stemming from the alleged suicide of Pvt. Danny Chen, an Asian American soldier in the U.S. Army who was driven to his death by three months of continuous mental and physical abuse and racist taunts from fellow soldiers and superior officers in Afghanistan.

Holcomb was found not guilty of negligent homicide, and guilty of “one count of assault and two counts of maltreatment of a subordinate.”  The court martial panel was given the discretion to charge “anything from no punishment up to the maximum, a dishonorable discharge, two years confinement and total forfeitures” but only delivered a sentence of 30-day confinement, $1,811.55 fine, and a reduction in rank.

An African American infantryman claimed that he too was subject to racist abuse by Holcomb.  “He told me he would kill me, put me in a body bag and send me home,” testified Pvt. Marcus Merritt.  He said the abuse he received from Holcomb before Chen arrived caused him to think seriously about committing suicide.

Seven more trials are scheduled to start soon to further probe the environment that permitted such treatment.

OCA-NY (Organization of Chinese Americans) has called for a public rally on Saturday, August 11 at 2 PM at Columbus Park in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown. Asian American Arts Centre will be a co-sponsor, along with other diverse community organizations.

The rally will protest the verdict and sentencing of the first of Danny’s superiors who was put on trial.

Links to more information about the case of Pvt. Danny Chen

Democracy Now: “First Soldier Tried in Hazing Death of Pvt. Danny Chen Gets 30-Day Term, Evades Homicide Conviction,” 8/1/12

AMY GOODMAN: Julia, what were you most struck by as you watched this court-martial?

JULIA CHUNG: I think what I was most struck by was the lack of awareness about Asian-American issues that the—even the defense attorneys had and the lower-ranking PFCs had, because when the witness was on testimony, one of the witnesses said, “Oh, ‘gook,’ that’s a common term for Asian Americans.“

Alternet: “U.S. Soldier Found Not Guilty of Negligent Homicide, Racist Hazing of Private Danny Chen,” 7/31/12

Free Speech Radio News: “Death of Chinese American Private Chen Caused by Racist Hazing,” January, 2012

UPDATE 8/13/12

A second soldier, Ryan J. Offutt, was sentenced today: six months in prison and discharged from the military for misconduct after pleading guilty to maltreatment and violating an order against hazing, part of a plea bargain that dropped more serious charges of reckless endangerment and negligent homicide.

Reuters: “U.S. soldier pleads guilty to hazing Chinese-American serviceman”

How Far We Haven’t Come: Friends vs. Terrorists

[Via Colorlines: Distinguishing Your Friends From Potential Terrorists]

A publication of the Chicago Tribune recently published a “Turban primer“, a taxonomy of Otherness in the wake of the white supremacist shootings at the Wisconsin Sikh temple.

“Angry Asian Man compares this to the a 1941 article in Life magazine on how to distinguish Japanese from Chinese people. Amazing how 71 years later, folks are still using the same finger-pointing tactics.”

Read Original Post by Hatty Lee at Colorlines.

Tortilla Subversion at Asian Art Museum

Eat, Pray, Take:  Tortilla screen-printed with Hoisin Sauce at the Asian Art Museum’s Matcha event last Thursday.  Click to enlarge.  (Photo: Terrance Graven)

A week ago (7/26/12), one of our founding members served as special guest artist of The Great Tortilla Conspiracy, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s monthly Thursday evening Matcha event.

This month’s Matcha was the culmination of a year-long “unofficial residency” project at the museum by artist Imin Yeh called SpaceBi.  For this event, Yeh invited more than two dozen APA and local artists to participate, which is unprecedented in that it is close to two dozen more than are typically invited by the museum. (Action-packed event Program here)

The Great Tortilla Conspiracy was among those invited, and the Conspiracy in turn invited me as their special guest.  Museum management was reportedly “thrilled” to learn of my participation.