Asian American Arts Centre: Writing on Ten Artists

This article and another accompanying it was first published in CUNY FORUM in the first section of Volume 11:1 summer of 2024.  This article features color images, where the CUNY article did not.  For the current transition of AAAC toward a community arts research center circa 2025, or for a synopsis of the five decades of AAAC’s visual arts program, see AAAC Beginnings to Recent Transitions.  For Eleanor Yung's articles on Basement Workshop, Danny and AADT see http://artspiral.org/index.php

 
Robert Lee is the Executive Director of the Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC), founded

originally in 1974 as the Asian American Dance Theatre, with roots in Basement

Workshop. The Arts Centre’s mission, starting in 1987, is to promote the preservation and

creative vitality of Asian American cultural growth through the arts, and its historical and

aesthetic linkage to other communities. Here, Lee presents some writings on ten artists that

have been exhibited by AAAC, including the late photojournalist Corky Lee, for CUNY

FORUM:

Akiko Kotani - Red Wind (Three sets of four hanging even-weave fabric panels, 2006):

Akiko Kotani’s “Red Wind” is a prime example of her ability to evoke tran-sient moments from the natural world through her abstract visual lexicon. The Hawaiian-born fiber artist, who now lives and works in Gulfport, Florida, captures the essence of grass swaying in the wind by stitching simple red lines on translucent silk panels and by overlapping several layers of it. A sense of depth and pictorial space is created. The poetic simplicity of Kotani’s art is influenced by her Buddhist practice and also integrates women’s handcrafts. The repetitive nature of weaving and embroidering, which are traditionally associated with women’s domestic work, is akin to engaging in meditation.

Likewise, upon viewing her work, one feels compelled to stay with her work and look intently, while reflecting on the transient beauty of nature. As Kotani continues to work with textiles, her success has garnered her work in international exhibitions and in private and public collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Anna Kuo - Deva Invocation I (Painting, 1989)

Anna Kuo’s artworks are states of mind reflecting an inner and outer consciousness. Inner realizations occur with a confrontation of the self in her paintings. Painting becomes a search for forces and the souls of life that exist but cannot be seen. The Tiananmen Square exhibition invoked by the 1989 student massacre in China transformed art into aesthetic markings, historicizes the life blood of the country into its material culture. In “Deva Invocation” the emotional and the political intersects in a doubled heartbreak.

Kuo states, “My piece... was a tribute to those who passed and those left behind. It raised a personal question - What does Tiananmen mean to me as an individual? How do I locate myself in relation to a disturbing global crisis? In the tradition of Buddhist awareness, I believe our inner issues and conflicts become a collective energy creating larger events like catastrophic climate change, population uprisings, corruption and war.”

Clear intuitive pathways move us into other realms of consciousness that allow spiritual expansion and understanding. The work towards a wisdom of intuition led her to contemplative practices like meditation, dream work, energetic healing and past/future life regressions. This has led to a deeper understanding of life and a chance to guide a trajectory. A chance to see the unconscious codes art can carry and to develop and shape the meaning of her art.

Dolly Unithan (1958–2018) Banner 89 

(Printed paper on canvas punctured by bullet holes, 96” x 25” x 10”, 1989)

Malaysian-born artist, Dolly Unithan, created “Banner 89” in response to the brutal Chinese governmental suppression of student and activist voices of dissent in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The work took part in AAAC’s exhibition on this issue. Unithan utilized twine, paper, and a bamboo frame to create this banner in blood red and black to demonstrate the brutality of the slaughter. The artist invited friends to shoot at the paper to make bullet holes in the work, and attached a bamboo flagpole so audiences could imagine carrying it into protest. Alluding to the horrors of the massacre in multiple ways, Unithan presented this weighted outcry to stand stoically like a headstone or coffin awaiting justice. Unithan is in the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the World Bank, and the Permanent Mission of Malaysia to the United Nations.

Eung Ho Park 박응호 - Sperm Spoons (1995)

South-Korean-born artist, Eung Ho Park, has exhibited widely in the U.S. and Korea, transforming mundane objects from daily life to depict contemporary narratives of humanity. 

For his piece “Sperm Spoons,” Park collected spoons from local thrift stores and arranged the handles of each spoon to line up facing the same direction, mimicking the process of fertilization in which millions of spermatozoa race towards the ovum.

Envision Park’s spoon sperms in the original exhibition context that he gave them—hundreds of spoon sperms within the profile outline of a Buddha statue. Then see multitudes of sperms swimming together, the enigma of this living substance born of the universe, giving shape to the existential question they pose. That our spiritual essence is inherent in the substance of our genes. Park has written it on the whole wall–the sky writ large in limitless space. For in both living matter and physical matter, are essential interactions, interrelationships that exist for all beings.

Inherent in the existential condition of matter is the essence of a spirituality. Spoons as sperms is a transformation through art both brilliant and lighthearted, both American and Asian.

Kim Soon-im - Wool Head (8” x 8” x 12”, 1995)

I met Soon-im Kim in 2006 when she came to visit me at AAAC’s gallery after her Vermont Studio Residency. The gallery, as part of a Chinatown community arts center, had been focused on Asian American art exhibiting regularly since the early 1980s, so I welcomed the opportunity to meet before she returned to Korea. What she showed me was raw wool fibers given the shape of a life-size portrait head of an older person. Incredibly detailed, clearly a portrait of a loving and kindly elder. Holding it in my hands, it was amazingly light. The woolly texture of the skin so soft to the touch as to seem quite natural. Each feature so finely rendered as if it was an exquisite drawing, yet this was raw wool fibers taking form in three-dimensional space.

What skills were mastered to adapt and create this marvel? Taught needlepoint by her grandmother at an early age, Kim was well-trained in this art by the time she attended university art classes. There, she was introduced to chiaroscuro drawing techniques with charcoal sticks, lessons in capturing light and shadow as it falls across undulating surfaces, keenly observing patterns of light. Kim wondered if she could do this with her needlepoint. Experimenting first in low relief, then in higher relief, eventually she could render her perceptions in the full round. In this way, Soon-im brought together into her art her Asian sensibility combined with a Western way of seeing.

I recall the Greek and Roman sculptures at the Met Museum where the portrait heads of Roman patriarchs that are nearly identical to Soon-im’s portrait head—except they are made of marble. Her portrait however, is not of a patriarch, but a poignant rendering of a gentle person, captured in the moment of light that it was seen.

Kim’s portrait head fused for me, the values of both Asia and the West. A most direct exemplary manifestation of what I was seeking to find. She revealed how Asia was changing, how people in Asia were experiencing some aspect of what I had experienced growing up in the United States. Close to her roots she could feel what it meant being challenged by a western drawing technique and in choosing to transfer it to a traditional fiber medium, she could retain the range of values of that medium, expanding and softening while she was transforming realism and imbuing it with an ephemeral tenderness. The gift of nature was not obscured for her by the notion of man’s dominion over nature. For me two cultures in her art became one signaling a symbiosis is possible.

Sung Ho Choi – Mind (2006)

Looking at Sung Ho Choi’s piece “Mind,” on display at Pearl River Mart (477 Broadway location), the Chinese character “心“ (xin) is shown written in gold dots. Rendered with lottery tickets, the character has two meanings. Aside from “mind,” it also means “heart.” In the West, according to Greek philosophy, ideas are permanent and the heart is emotional, unreliable. In East Asia, someone might speak of something important, and point to their heart, since thinking was conceived as one heart-mind. The character ‘Xin’ has meant this for centuries.

In Chinatown, I see many Asian people amidst their daily toil in America’s immigrant economy, invoking their chance to win as if each day’s luck has to do with what their life may offer. Risk is part of our fundamental human equation. It can be met with joy, even affection, regardless of how the numbers for the lottery turn out. Tomorrow is another day! It’s a moment, perhaps a special one, which we can look to in our day, a way of thinking that is light of heart. The Tao of one heart-mind. Choi’s art speaks to Asian immigrant life in the West, of the choice all Asian Americans have as to how to “think.”

Toshio Sasaki – Sun Gate (1988)

Toshio Sasaki’s artwork entitled “Sun Gate,” is a sketch for a monumental entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. It was one of several submitted proposals to AAAC for the 1988 “Public Art in Chinatown” exhibition. A creative contemporary gateway to Chinatown and to New York City. This massive form, standing upon two legs, sustains a beam of light that reaches up to the night sky, similar to the Tribute in Light at the September 11 Memorial each year. The elevated circular form is like the “bi,” a Chinese symbol for the celestial universe. It is an ethical order modelled after a vision of the universe, composed to upstage the columnated structured entrance to the bridge that still stands there today. You could say it’s unlikely New York would ever build Sasaki’s gate. True, but a similar idea along the same lines as his is underway today thirty-two years later in Australia (Lindy Lee’s “Ouroboros”) to the tune of $14 million dollars.

Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–1990) – Goofy (Photograph, 1982)

The enormous wit that Tseng Kwong Chi brought to the contemporary spectacle is matched only by his high seriousness. A native of Hong Kong, and a downtown New York art scene fixture by the mid-1980s, he first became known for his poster-sized black and white photographs, the perpetual foreigner, juxtaposing himself against famous architectural and tourist sites in Europe and the U.S. Dressed in a Maoist Red Army suit and standing in front of Notre Dame, Tower Bridge, or with Mickey Mouse at Disney World, he transformed himself into a faceless Asian tourist from the People’s Republic of China, pointing us to the ironies and stereotypes, as well as the contrasts between two cultures.

In the last few years of his life, Tseng explored the North American wilderness, took photographs of the Grand Canyon, and saw the natural landscape as a ‘spiritual journey,’ where he is not only a spectator contemplating his environment, but he is also asking viewers to speculate about the presence of his persona in the North American landscape.

Yoshiki Araki (1950–2000) – "Dog" (2006)

Yoshiki Araki was born in March 1950 in Hiroshima, Japan. Raised by his mom in Kuri, he did not see his dad much, who had served in the navy during World War II, rising to the position of Rear Admiral in the Defense Department. To nearby islands he could swim to pick watermelons or see rocks dressed as people. Theirs was similar to an old “Samurai” family. When the A-bomb fell on Hiroshima, his grandfather was there. The next day his mother, then a young girl, went into what was left of the city to search through the devastation for him. She never did.

As a young man, Araki studied with a folk master of layered opaque watercolor illustration for a few years in a small fishing village in Hokkaido. Wanting to come to the United States, he saved for a year by working a jackhammer in a mine. He then spent it all in a month on fun. Araki did eventually make it to New York in 1974 studying at the Art Students League, living on Amsterdam Ave, in Harlem and later on Presidents Street in Brooklyn. This is where he could lose himself in books, especially Japanese detective novels. He performed in the Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble in the late ‘80s to early ‘90s, traveling with them to perform in Hiroshima.

His paintings became larger in the mid-1980s, when he confronted his ties to Hiroshima, and then his surfaces began to be covered by black tar. Cans, bones, cages and/or tree branches could be taped there with eggs or lemons or sheet metal. Later paraffin wax became part of his work with an exacting form of photo collage. Finely constructed small flat boxes filled with wax surrounded a central surface with a painted collage image. Body parts in surreal configurations often populate this small stage painted dark, at times with a horizon in yellow. Large standing railroad ties became his sculpture, topped with wax and long protruding bones splayed. In the late ‘90s Araki prepared to produce hundreds of wax boxes, filling the basement below his large studio with materials he had crafted ready to go.

Then in mid-2000 circumstances changed, forcing him from his home and studio. In his search for a place to live and work, there was the possibility of having to leave New York after so many years in the U.S. Under the pressure of landlord harassment, the stress and tension of trying to find a new space to accommodate so much that he had gathered and planned, these factors had an impact on his health. Later that year Araki became ill and had to be hospitalized. He died shortly thereafter.

In the body of work that was saved by his wife and friends, Araki’s evolution as an artist can be seen. The profound impact of Hiroshima on his psyche, how this resolved for him and where it led him to produce the kind of haunting imagery that remains his legacy to us. Artists who have seen war, can go beyond the human form, violate it, no longer afraid, as he seemed to do, slicing open his own torso, gathering the grammar of his visual parts, cut clean, till bones emerge and a blossom gut. A deep sea of translucent wax protects us, the salve of ritual confines the enigma.

We have been taught to tolerate violence, to look past its pain, especially when it’s surgical and meant for positive outcomes. The consequences of military action is ‘good,’ the collateral damage to people is to be ‘tolerated,’ at least until it can be put aside and forgotten. Like a newspaper image. So many realities are not faced because of this kind of skillful practice. The A-bomb is one of these.

Araki chose a different path. His art and his life hold a logic contrary to so much of what is current and acceptable. His work reveals our subliminal attraction to violence. It connects us to past eras when the fantasy fodder that cushion us today was not possible, was undreamt. Araki has made the undisclosed underbelly of society into an art transparent. He exposes social convention to its own undoing. Araki came to this turn in his art, a mode of art making that took hold in the last ten years of his life. He knew, like others, a Kafka-esque world lies just beneath the surface. To face it is to live with what humanity is capable of, to re-consider our human limits, as he did. Araki, however, was on his way to coming out the other side, despite the pain, restored, a human being.

From Hiroshima a reconciliation still awaits us, and may be possible, as Araki has shown, perhaps on terms unexpected.

Corky Lee - Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Photograph, 1980s)

Corky Lee could have called it “Four Sojourners” but he did not. He could even have named it “Shambhala Warriors” after Chögyam Trungpa. But he titled it “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” He was aware of how different cultures could interpret our presence—the dilemma, the contradictions, the challenge of what it is to be “Asian American.” Corky said this scene caught his eye, and knowing he wanted to capture it he waited three hours for two of the men to return after entering a building on the right. Similar to photos he did set up, Corky with utter patience waited till it recomposed itself.

Corky then chose to name it so, impressing upon it the spark of an imaginative paradox inherently fusing ancient visionary history to a common scene on Mott Street—to how we come to be here, by way of the daring and courage of our forefathers. “Four Horsemen” marks a path that may be established by his example for photographers as activists skilled in patience to attain justice.

However, there is more to Corky, I believe, than justice. I am likely not mistaken to say Corky held great love for those four men to wait so patiently to portray them just as they are, the source of who we are as Asian Americans, whether standing up for themselves, or simply standing around. This is how Corky lived and worked, and did what he loved. With the sparks of paradox, imagination, history and commitment, Corky transformed this photo into a work of art. It is in community where he knew belonging. Community where we are affirmed, a place, a state of mind, where we belong.

~~~

I remember meeting Corky when hanging out on Henry Street in front of I Wor Kuen in 1970. He had bought his first camera and was flush with excitement. His job later was with Expedi Printing. He handled customers and clients so I often worked with him to get our printing done for AAAC.

In conversations, Corky remembered, it seemed, everything, and could turn the smallest thing into memories and stories. He was quite the bard. Around that time, he started to use the phrase “self-proclaimed undisputed unofficial Asian-American photographer laureate.” Corky was like that. We would laugh. He was shameless at self-promotion.

Corky changed. He evolved. The older he got I could see him transform himself. Then he had another phrase you may recall: “It’s hard being Corky Lee.”

I started to see how people cared about Corky as he nurtured and learned to show sincerely how he cared about people, about our community. That he had chosen to devote himself to being, actually fulfilling the unofficial title he had given himself, was more than remarkable. Corky evolved skills in being Corky. I know of no other artist or photographer who has sought to do likewise. In his own way he has brought our many communities together. Is this not also part of Corky’s art?