Nam June Paik and Laurel Nakadate at the Margins of Asian American Film and Video

My 2015 book Making Asian American Film and Video argued that public institutions played a definitive role in the history of Asian American film and video, grounding the genre in the public funding, exhibition, and broadcasting of American independent film and video.¹ The book argues that state-funded public institutions like PBS and their policies on multiculturalism shaped the burgeoning genre of Asian American film and video. Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to how online platforms like YouTube have uncovered new possibilities for Asian American filmmakers to thrive, which seems to continue the legacy of communal, institutional filmmaking. And yet what is often minimized in this discourse is the role of experimental and avant-garde film and video in Asian American film and video, which has hovered on the edges of the discourse of mainstream institution building in Asian American film and video. Despite the marginalization of that role, it has been crucial in upholding diversity within the genre. In addition to experimental media's historical marginality in Asian American film and video, other boundary-defying issues, such as notions of the postracial and the transnational, are also important sites of inquiry not only in determining the definitive boundaries of Asian American film and video but also in locating its future directions.

Therefore, what I am interested in at the moment is an alternative history of Asian American film and video filtered through the international avant-garde and its descendants within the larger art world as a way of rethinking the interaction of the transnational and the place of race in Asian American film and video. Here I reenvision, for example, the work of the past (the pioneering video art of Nam June Paik) and the present (the films and video installations of Laurel Nakadate) as works of Asian American moving-image art to show how experimental media can be much more open and incisive than those narrative fictional feature films and shorts, as well as acclaimed documentaries, that currently fill out the center of the received history of Asian American film and video, yet still raise questions about institutional and representational racism. Therefore, #OscarsSoWhite notwithstanding, despite the evidence that Asian American media may be evolving and exploding in positive ways through online communities like YouTube, the texts and contexts of Asian American experimental film and video illuminate the continued problem of institutional racism against Asian American artists and the discursive invisibility of Asian Americans.

One of the most critical issues of Asian American studies in the past few decades has been the tension between "national" and "transnational" identifications. That is, the cultural and social transformations created by post-1970s globalization and migration have blurred the boundary between Asian and Asian American identities. The media studies landscape in particular has become inundated with the wish to coalesce "Asian" and "Asian American" through the notion of a common diaspora. And yet, as Sau-ling Wong reminds us, this "denationalization" tendency veers toward a dehistoricization and depoliticization of crucial decades of establishing recognition for Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.²

Although written thirty years ago, Wong's influential article "Denationalization" points out that it is not a question of coalescing toward a "more transnational" Asian American subjectivity, but that the transnational is a trend that comes and goes in different guises and with different flows that occur over time within the Asian diaspora. Therefore, Wong urges that to understand the shifting relationship between transnational and nationalist discourses of Asianness, "we need to historicize the push to globalize Asian American cultural criticism. Without such historicizing, one of the most important aspirations of denationalization—to dialogize and trouble American myths of nation—may end up being more subverted than realized."³

Indeed, often the utopian vision of transnationalism coexists, interestingly enough, with the challenges of institutional racism against Asian Americans, illuminating exactly what Wong describes. For example, one important comparison worth exploring is that between Paik's global vision of liberated televisual global flow and the ethos of resistance against institutional closed doors represented by the experiences...