"Red Beans and Rice: Asian Artist in the New South"
K�an Jeff Baysa
This landmark exhibition stemmed from a conversation held roughly two years ago by the curators in a pickup truck traveling between studio visits in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky. Born and raised in Hawaii, I remarked that for me the southland was a region in America about which I knew very little, but I knew that there was an Asian presence in the South drawn there by opportunity, employment and education, as well as by displacement and relocation. This conversation catalyzed a journey of exploration and education for the curators–one of Filipino heritage, born and raised in Hawaii, the other a native son of Kentucky–and culminated in the exhibition that examines the mutual influences of talented artists of Asian heritage and their life experiences in the evolving post-bellum southeastern United States.
"The New South" is an area of tradition charged with diversification and reinvention, as the area reconfigures itself with an influx of people from outside the region and the country. As the political, economic and cultural mass of this new populace, notably from Mexico and Asia, establishes itself and alters the demographics, existing attitudes toward race and class in these states are irrevocably impacted.
The thirteen selected artists come from six different countries and have been influenced by eight southern states. Within the Contemporary’s capacious, challenging galleries are the constructs of personal resident spaces or landscapes, manifest and encoded adaptations of transitioning between and within cultures. There is a pleasing range of scale, from Jaia Chen’s large wall installation addressing the interstices of Chinese and western landscape painting, to Megumi Akiyoshi’s diminutive doll figures that take on the faces of their viewers> There is also a broad range of mediums, from Arthur Liou’s large, poignantly dramatic videos about his daughter’s leukemia, to the fragile borders depicted in Kazuko Matsumoto’s photographs. Ying Kit Chan’s drawings on Tyvek visually pit the thorny and hardy honey locust tree against industrial structures, while Edie Tsong’s works examine the roles of costume and the beauty pageant as mirror and projection. Jan-Ru Wan’s rich fabric installations link the material world and the sublime, paralleling Bo Zhang’s keratinoid allusions to the fantastic and the tangled issues of beauty and utility. Prince Thomas’s large digital diptychs portray mental landscapes and the pharmaceutical spanning of the ideal and the real. The intercalated realities of James Nakagawa’s digital photographs are effective foils to Lordy Rodriguez’s unlabeled yet detailed maps. Jiha Moon’s culturally rich, layered and ordered paintings play well off of Yun Bai’s large, scintillatingly energetic, unstretched painting on canvas and suspended ping-pong ball sculpture.
