ARTS
“SLAYSIAN,” an Art Show at Home An Asian American exhibition adapts to the pandemic era
BY EILEEN LI
I
"WHERE ARE YOU FROM", KAITLYN HWANG
16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JUNE 24, 2020
n her years on the Chicago art scene, curator Jenny Lam had never seen a large-scale exhibit that focused on local Asian American art. “So I figured I should be the one to do it,” she said. After putting out an open call to Chicago and the surrounding Midwest, Lam chose thirty-nine Asian American artists to participate in the exhibit “SLAYSIAN.” The show was scheduled to run at the CoProsperity Sphere in Bridgeport, beginning Saturday, March 20. But on March 15, as Lam was in the gallery assigning spots to the artworks, she heard Governor J.B. Pritzker on the radio pleading for Illinoisans to stay home. It was St. Patrick’s Day weekend, there were 3,000 known coronavirus cases in the U.S., and hosting a large gathering for an art show opening felt irresponsible. Lam and her staff made the call to postpone the in-person show indefinitely and to move the exhibition online. The digital version of “SLAYSIAN,” like the in-person show, aims to shine a light on the presence of Asian American art in and around Chicago. Spanning neighborhoods, ethnicities, and mediums, “SLAYSIAN” showcases a subset of artists that have always been part of the city’s art scene, but rarely acknowledged as a collective. The online exhibition presents each artist’s works alongside an introduction written by the artist. These texts often reflect how Asian Americans code each other and themselves in degrees of foreignness: when and at what age you immigrated, whether you speak your “native” language, your artistic and media influences, and your diasporic or biracial identities. Some artists, such as Eddie Yeung and Nini Kao, specifically name the Asian influences they riff upon, like the art of Hayao Miyazaki and the foods eaten at
Chinese New Year. Others, such as Priscilla Huang, paint city scenes recognizable to many Chicagoans, like a Wednesday afternoon lounging in a city park. On Bumjin Kim’s page, two of his computer-aided drawings highlight the spectrum of foreignness and localness that is implicitly read into Asian American work. In the drawing “Morning,” he depicts a bowl of rice with each grain articulated, complete with a pair of slanted chopsticks. In “Evening,” a drawing of the same series, he portrays happy-hour ease by sliding an Intelligentsia coffee cup holder over a can of Goose Island 312 beer. Juxtaposed side by side, he manifests distinctly Chicagoan and perpetually Asian tastes over the course of a single day. Taiwanese American artist Kaitlyn Hwang also grapples with the idea of foreignness in her painting “Where Are You From.” The oil-on-canvas painting is a self-portrait of Hwang in a traditional Chinese <i>qipao</i> with her daughter in a Superman costume. Hwang uses the figures in the portrait to contrast her immigrant upbringing with that of her half-Asian and more Americanized daughter: “I’m thinking, what kinds of traditions can I still teach her that she’ll remember so she can keep true to herself ? I just wanted to think about the future for her, and my past, and how we can come together, how we can both exist.” Two of Hwang’s watercolors portray her hope that political engagement can build a better world for her daughters. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Hwang became involved with the Women’s March and local activist groups in her Oak Park community, and her paintings depict young families marching on Washington. “I actually took my girls canvassing a couple of times to get people aware of how important their vote is,” Hwang said. “I’m not sure
