San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cantor shows its dedication to more representation of Asian Americans
“East of the Pacific,” at Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, makes a strong case that Asian American art is a fundamental part of American art history.
Featuring 96 artworks spanning from the 1880s to the 21st century, the exhibition reorients California, not only as a place receiving westward migration, but as a cultural location formed by its position east of the Pacific. Artistic marvels, such as a gorgeous, royal-blue Martin Wong painting of a Chinatown dragon that commands attention, accompany historical revelations.
Six roughly chronological sections present a story that is familiar in broad strokes — such as migration, the Japanese American incarceration — but uncommon in its richness. Bay Area audiences, for instance, might have heard of Chiura Obata, the early 20th century painter who taught at UC Berkeley and is the subject of a show currently at the Asian Art Museum. But it’s unlikely that they’ve seen the postcard-sized watercolors he made in 1909 while working in the Sacramento Valley grape and hop fields.
Early works attest to the syncretic richness of Asian American artistic exploration in the late 19th century. Toshio Aoki’s 1895 oil painting, “Persimmons in an Indian Basket,” spills Hachiya persimmons, a varietal introduced to California from Japan in the mid-19th century, out of an Indigenous basket loosely based on Hopi forms. An entire section of the exhibit, titled “The East West Art Society,” showcases works by the interethnic group, founded in 1921 to increase understanding and mutual learning.
“East of the Pacific” is part of an inaugural trio of shows at Cantor Arts Center presented by the Asian American Art
Initiative, an enterprise dedicated to the study of Asian American artists that launched in 2018, helmed by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, curator of American art at the Cantor, and Marci Kwon, a professor of art history at Stanford. The other two include “The Faces of Ruth Asawa,” featuring 233 life masks the Japanese American sculptor made of her friends, and “At Home/On Stage: Asian American Representation in Photography and Film.” In total, they display around 150 works of art by Asian American artists, many of them shown in a museum for the first time.
“We really wanted to come out with a bang and show our dedication to this material,” Alexander told The Chronicle.
To be able to present large shows like “East of the Pacific,” AAAI has been busy amassing what is sure to be an important collection of Asian American art, especially because the educational setting encourages broader collecting such as work by young artists and ephemera, in addition to large showstoppers. Before this concerted effort, Alexander said the Cantor had only 33 objects made by Asian American artists in its collec
tion of more than 41,000 works prior to 2018. The museum now boasts more than 250.
Among them is Obata’s 1937 painting “Yosemite Falls.” Coincidentally, Obata chose to paint El Capitan from the same angle that Ansel Adams would choose 15 years later for his famous photograph. But the angle is as far as the similarity goes between the two artists. Obata’s liquid-black sumi-e brushwork infuses the view of Yosemite with a Japanese American interpretation, one that presents viewers an entirely different perspective than Adams’ oft reproduced image. Lush pools of fluid ink make the landscape flow with movement in contrast to Adams’ crisp, unmoving crag.
The personal, horrible histories emerge in woodcuts by Henry Sugimoto that depict the banalities and griefs of life for Japanese Americans in the internment camps created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt with Executive Order 9066. The prints were donated to AAAI by Patrick Hayashi, himself a camp survivor and one of the earliest professors of Asian American Studies at UC Berkeley. “Bathing” and “Playing Go” hang near “My Son Hurt in Action,” depicting two detained parents reading the bad news. All three pieces “challenge notions of the American canon, the idea of who is central to the American narrative and who’s been here all along,” Alexander said.
Toward the end of the exhibit, a section titled “Histories of Abstraction” fills a wall with varied examples of Asian American artists experimenting with the same questions other 20th century artists explored. Soojai Lee’s 1964 blurred pastel, poised between linear movements and indistinct color patches, deserves to be seen in context with works by Helen Frankenthaler and Cy Twombly.
Despite the efforts of Asian American artists across the years, “Asian American art is
still one of the most underrepresented fields of art,” said Alexander. But that’s changing, thanks to AAAI and the efforts of other local institutions. Opportunities to see Asian American art abound in the Bay Area. The Asian Art Museum, for instance, has retrospectives of Obata, Carlos Villa and Bernice Bing on display, and the San José Museum of Art is presenting “Kelly Akashi: Formations,” through May.
“This work and material is obviously essential to the understanding of artistic production in this country,” Alexander said. “This is really just the beginning.”