‘Legacies’ Celebrates Asian American Artistic Strategies

A sprawling survey of more than 90 artists and collectives at 80WSE Gallery, ‘Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (1969–2001)’ examines how, during the latter part of the 20th century, individual Asian American artists succeeded in showing their work at the country’s highest institutions while the collectives to which they belonged remained at the margins.

The broadly chronological exhibition opens with a presentation of magazines, books and event flyers by the Asian American collective Basement Workshop (1970–86), which organized publications, music nights and art workshops outside of mainstream institutions. Color Mock-up for Costumes from ‘Passage’ (1985–86), for instance, shows activities from the Asian American Dance Theatre – a Basement Workshop offshoot – which held classes and performances from 1974 to 1990.

The year Basement Workshop folded saw the launch of art collective Godzilla (1990–2001), which continued to foster a social space for Asian American artists. Godzilla’s founders had previously been involved in Tuesday Lunch Club, a weekly gathering of artists and curators at Chinatown restaurants, whose menu pricing matched the budgets of the struggling participants. Through exhibitions, events and printed materials, Godzilla sought to diversify cultural production within and outside of institutions. In 1991, they wrote a letter to the Whitney Museum, criticizing that year’s biennial for its exclusion of Asian American artists. ‘The failure of the 1991 Biennial to acknowledge our contributions makes its claims to diversity and inclusivity ring hollow,’ reads the facsimile on view. One of the letter writers was Korean American artist Byron Kim, whose painting Synecdoche (1991–92) (not on view here) went on to be included in the subsequent Whitney Biennial in 1993. That edition’s multicultural emphasis led Eleanor Heartney, a white critic, to observe in Art in America that the show felt ‘numbingly didactic’.

Those Asian American artists whose works were included in such blockbuster institutional shows tended to reference white artists while speaking from a minority position. Kim’s Untitled (1994), for instance, echoes the stripe paintings of Agnes Martin, but it does so in the hues of traditional Korean ceramics from the Koryŏ Dynasty. Meanwhile David Diao’s painting Odd Man Out (1974) adopts the crisp abstraction of hard-edge painters like Ellsworth Kelly.

By the time I reach the show’s more recent works, I have nearly become convinced of the individual’s dominance over the group, as if the telos of Asian American collectives led to works like Nikki S. Lee’s The Ohio Project (7) (1999), a photograph of the artist, with bleached blonde hair, posing with a white man holding a rifle beneath a Confederate flag – gesturing either a cultural nihilism or a radical empathy that bulldozes difference.

But then I encounter Bernadette Corporation: Fashion Shows (1995–97), a video documenting the group’s original activities as an underground fashion label.  Why had I never associated the group with Asian American art? Founded by Sonny Pak, Thuy Pham and Bernadette Van-Huy, Bernadette Corporation (1994–ongoing) has, among other activities, staged fashion shows outside of the institution of New York Fashion Week, co-authored the novel Reena Spaulings (2004) and opened a still-operational downtown gallery. The collective never claimed the term ‘Asian American’, perhaps because it wasn’t solely Asian American – but then neither was Godzilla, who counted anyone attending a meeting as a member, Asian or not. Despite the appellation, Bernadette Corporation embodies the spirit of organizations like Godzilla and Basement Workshop. While these disbanded groups might not have immediate name recognition outside of Asian American circles, their strategies – namely, building social architectures and committing to collective authorship – live on.

‘Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (1969–2001)’ is on view at 80WSE until 20 December

^{Main image: Vitrine devoted to Basement Workshop, 1972–78 (detail), in ‘Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (1969–2001)’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: 80WSE, NYU; photograph: Carter Seddon}