Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art by Susette Min (review)

Asian American art is a relatively new topic of scholarly inquiry. Works such as Why Asia? Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art (1998), Fresh Talk / Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (2003), Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (2008), Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (2009), Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (2017), and other contributions to the field have made visible a broad range of Asian American artists, offered compelling insights into their lives and works, and created a rich discourse of Asian American art history. Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art complements this body of work by asking us to consider the utility of the name “Asian American art.” The book begins by looking back at racial- and ethnic-specific exhibitions of the 2000s, in particular One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (2006), curated by Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette Min. In an essay included in the exhibition catalog, Min wrote of the necessity of “identity-based exhibitions” alongside the delimitations of existing curatorial frameworks. Unnamable expands upon these earlier reflections, situating the multicultural exhibitions of the 1990s and the racial- and ethnic-specific exhibitions that followed in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. Min concludes, “The politics of naming art ‘Asian American’ at this historical juncture within an ethnic-specific exhibitionary framework subjugates or constrains the work, burdening it with a ready-made set of interpretations already embedded in the collective imagination” (27). While acknowledging the continuing underrepresentation of artworks by Asian Americans, Min seeks to move away from a “politics of recognition” to a “reformation of perception, reorienting the futurity of Asian American art” (18). Unnamable thus sets out to explore a “supplementary” way of showing and engaging with “Asian American art.”

Min’s focus on curatorial strategies brings a new perspective to familiar questions of identity and difference, race and representation. The introduction asks, “How does one weigh a call and desire for inclusion against the very logic of neoliberal multiculturalism that will co-opt this inclusion?” (13). She looks to French philosopher Jacques Rancière and his theory of aesthetics and politics as a way of “foregrounding aesthetics to reconceptualize Asian American art” (20). Although Rancière has been prominent in discourses of contemporary art theory and criticism for at least the past decade, his work will likely be less familiar to scholars in Asian American studies. However, Min takes care to explicate key concepts, joining his thought to Lisa Lowe’s work to bring in a more familiar set of ideas. She also situates her work within a recent interest in the aesthetic in Asian American literary and cultural studies. Notably, Rancière also figures prominently in Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (2019).

Chapter 1 demonstrates how exhibitions can shape the reception of artworks and offers insight into the challenges of showing work by Asian American artists within prevailing art world conventions and expectations by examining The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Asia/America (1994), and Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents (2008). The remainder of the book, conceived as “mini-exhibitions on paper and case studies,” presents critical analyses of the work of a handful of established artists: Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Nikki S. Lee, Simon Leung, and Mary Lum (6). Each chapter is organized around themes that are familiar to Asian American studies even as the works themselves, selected for their conceptual richness and aesthetic strategies, do not directly “represent” these topics. Chapter 2 considers labor and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece) and One Year Performance, 1980–1981 (Time Piece), Byron Kim’s Whitney Philip Morris: Wall Drawings (1999), and Simon Leung’s Squatting Project/Berlin (1994). Chapter 3 emphasizes space, history, and memory in selected works by Mary Lum alongside Simon Leung’s Surf Vietnam (1998). Unfortunately, the book does...