Having worked in the “community arts” for nearly a decade, I’m familiar with the frustration of “political” and “ethnic” artists. The moneyed, mainstream international arts scene places aesthetics and formal issues far above content. Even if this weren’t so, any political or identity content in art makes the work — and the artist — automatically suspect.
Those of artist Christine Wong Yap’s Asian American contemporaries who are making a splash in more mainstream venues tend to come out of conceptualism. Wong Yap’s reputation in the community, however, was originally made in the traditional forms of “activist” art: socialist-realist-influenced graphics, screenprinting, muralism, flyers, t-shirts, and buttons. In fact, my own history with the artist comes from her work creating graphics for, and contributing paintings to, Asian American community exhibitions with a distinctly racial-power flavor.
For such an artist to make a turn into pure conceptualism can be jarring. Wong Yap, who recently graduated from an MFA program at CCA, and has been experimenting with conceptualism for years, still gets requests to produce murals from bewildered community arts administrators. Under a particular gun to explain herself, she is taking advantage of the project Activist Imagination, currently exhibiting at Kearny Street Workshop, to show off the state of her art.
Activist Imagination, an examination of “activist art” in a context of artistic pluralism, is a collaboration between Wong Yap, longtime community activist and photographer Bob Hsiang, and conceptual “activist artist” Donna Keiko Ozawa. The show was commissioned by the Creative Work Fund, and involves both a blog and an ongoing series of public panels on topics related to Asian American activism and arts practice. As part of the project, the artists were given access to Kearny Street Workshop’s archives, including over thirty-five years’ worth of screenprinted posters.
The process by which the artists arrived at their collaboration is still somewhat opaque to me, but the result is confusing. If there is dialogue here, I can’t hear it. For Hsiang’s straightforward piece using art to document activism, the artist has produced a new series of color photo portraits of local community activists, and installed them in an irregular grid, each next to a single artifact meaningful to the activist portrayed. Ozawa’s work comprises three thematically unrelated sculptures, each involving sound: a miniature house on a crank containing a sheep-sound can, a buddha-sculpture containing a radio tuned to the weather channel, and a doorway wired to a sound installation that was not yet up and running by the opening reception.
