Michael Arcega

Born in 1973, Manila, the Philippines
Lives and works in San Francisco, California

Catholicism was introduced to the Philippines by the Spanish in 1521 and has since become the predominate religion of the archipelago. Through their missionary work, the Spanish gained greater control in their conquered lands, subduing local populations with psychological threats of damnation and promises of eternal life. Many local rulers relinquished their own religions (and unwittingly their power) under the seductive spell of the Spanish religion, which brought access to firepower and gifts of shiny metals. Catholicism also introduced a new set of myths to the islands, complete with supernatural occurrences, a vengeful god, and promises of paradise.

The allegory of Noah’s Ark provided a story to which the native people of the islands could easily relate. This passage in the Bible tells of divine intervention and salvation and offers the faithful an infinite inheritance in the form of a boat. It also provides justification for the Christians’ and other Bible-based religions’ assumed right of domination. Speaking to Noah and his kin, God says:

Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. (from the New International Version of the Old Testament)

This quote functions much like Manifest Destiny did for the United States—a doctrine that served as a driving force to go from “sea to shining sea” and conquer everything in between regardless of who or what existed there before.

In the era of global warming, devastating hurricanes, and tsunamis, the icon of Noah’s Ark has a more current and complicated symbolism. We are confronted by disasters all over the globe with seemingly inadequate rescue efforts. As in the FEMA/Katrina tragedy, the poor and infirmed are left to their own demise. These questions arise: Who is worthy of saving and who is left to drown? Who will inherit the earth? Who decides?

Xavier Cha

Born in 1980, Los Angeles, California
Lives and works in New York, New York

The video works Topiary Tags and Human Advertisement Series question our preconceived notions about public and private spaces and the divisions between them. Topiary Tags shows various hedgerows surrounding private Los Angeles residences, onto which the name “Xavier” has been carved. The absurdity of a wall made of leaves and its function as the public face of a private place is exposed by its contrast with the street culture of graffiti tagging, which is referenced in the “tagging” of the hedges.

The work Human Advertisement Series takes on the traditional advertising strategy of a “sandwich man.” Using the costume of a shrimp for a sushi restaurant or a giant fingernail for a nail salon, these guerilla performances exploit the images associated with stereotypical Asian American businesses and spoof the private ownership of the businesses.

Patty Chang

Born in 1972, San Francisco, California
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West is a translation of the magazine article written by Walter Benjamin about Anna May Wong. In his essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923), Benjamin says, “. . . translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.” Wong and Benjamin, both outsiders of their respective cultures, meet at a party in Berlin. The space itself resembles a film set, wavering back and forth between exotic and banal. His language is ornamental, poetic, and peppered with Chinese quotations, as if to situate her in an appropriate setting. It constantly reminds us of foreignness and authenticity, of translation and misinterpretation, and of the mirror pointed towards herself and towards others. But perhaps also in the meeting there is a conspicuously missed opportunity to connect on their outsider status; as he quotes from the “. . . Ju-Kia-Li, ‘Useless chit-chat about people’s opportunities prevents important counsel’.” In the rereading of the article, there is a confusion about his tone and an awkwardness to the process of interpretation.

A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West is a study for a larger project about Anna May Wong, translation, and transculturation at the advent of sound film.

Binh Danh

Born in 1977, Kien Giang, Vietnam
Lives and works in San Jose, California

In a war-torn jungle, memories survive. They bleed into the soil and seep into the roots of plants. The plants reflect these spirits into corporeal forms. What you see here are the faces of the American dead in Vietnam during the week of May 28 to June 3, 1969. During my investigation of the Vietnam and American War era, I found a Life Magazine issue titled “One Week’s Dead,” featuring the portraits of these fallen soldiers. Using the process of photosynthesis, I printed these portraits onto leaves so you can imagine what death might look like when the body decays and the memories remain. How does the jungle tell what it witnesses? How do the spirits remain, camouflaged in the jungle?

Mari Eastman

Born in 1970, Berkeley, California
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

I work from a variety of sources culled from magazines, newspapers, books, personal photos, as well as paintings, fabric patterns, and illustrations. My work is representational. I like portraits of animals, decorative art, and landscapes. I like to mix it up, from a combination of restlessness and a desire for equilibrium. A painting of a fountain at Versailles is balanced by a bombing in Iraq, for example. Mostly, I am a painter, using acrylic, vinyl-based paint, oil, spray paint and glitter. Occasionally I make sculptures from Sculpey or cement. Sometimes when the paintings are installed I continue the imagery onto the wall in a sketchy manner, using a Sharpie marker.

Quoted from: Sonia Campagnola, “Focus Los Angeles: A Survey of Contemporary Los Angeles Art,” Flash Art (International Edition) 39 (January/February 2006), 69.

Ala Ebtekar

Born in 1978, Berkeley, California
Lives and works in Berkeley, California

In Elemental, I explore the merging of styles from two different cultural traditions spanning opposite ends of the world and separated by centuries—Iranian coffee house culture and hip-hop culture. Although they may seem disconnected, both of these traditions are grounded in reflecting the lives of people who are often marginalized and in providing a common space for people to come together to share history, news, and information. Through sculpture, painting, and sound, I distill the components of these empowering traditions into their essential and elemental components, deconstructing and reconstructing time, space, and history while providing a visual crossroads where contemporary events meet mythology, creating a hybridized narrative with infinite interpretations.

This work was conceived more than three years ago, developed through meetings, collaboration, exchange, travel, and studio work, and was first exhibited in San Francisco in 2004. By merging influences, a visual atmosphere is presented that imagines the confluence of hip-hop culture within the physical and architectural space of a traditional Iranian coffee house. In effect, I articulate a moment in time where the past and the present collide. Here the audience is invited to envision and experience the many types of interactions that could happen in this hybridized place, amongst MCs and coffee house narrators, graffiti artists and coffee house painters, b-boys and wrestlers, DJs and drummers.

Chitra Ganesh

Born in 1975, Brooklyn, New York
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

I continue to be obsessed by how memories, dreams, and their repression shape personal and social crises, be it between lovers or global empires. My work is largely inspired by Hindu and other mythologies, lyric poetry and song lyrics (both Bollywood and girl rock), the logic of dreams, and present-day imperialism and queer politics. I’m fascinated by how traditional mythology/folklore celebrates sex and violence, but only to instill notions of appropriate behavior and gender expression by punishing those who attempt to transgress societal norms.

My ongoing interest in the problems of producing a coherent narrative, and working towards a visual language for love and disappearance, is informed as much by nineteenth-century portraiture and post-colonial literature as by graphic novels and zines, current events, and song lyrics. The hybrid world created in my drawings and installation, specifically in the repetition of the wounded and fractured body, its distortion, open wounds, and fixation on self-harm, articulate both social and psychic conflict.

Glenn Kaino

Born in 1972, Los Angeles, California
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Dr. Sean McNamara

So tell me what you don’t like
about yourself?

ISABELLE DINOIRE lights up a cigarette.

Isabelle

It’s like when you’re a kid at an
amusement park and you’re having
the greatest time, ice cream,
ferris wheel and stuffed animals.
And it gets late and you beg your
parents to let you stay, you’ll be
so good, you’ll do anything they
ask. So they say okay... Only now,
the steps are harder to climb. You
have a tummy ache, and you’re too
tired to wait in line for rides
anymore. And suddenly you begin to
cry.

---

Clayton Bigsby

What kind of people is it in which
I am comprised? Good people? Bad
people?

Dr. Christian Troy

Materials, nothing more.

Clayton

You’re wrong. Why do you say
that? Do you have a sub-conscious
desire to harm me?

Dr. Troy

I assure you, any desire I have to
harm you is totally conscious.

Geraldine Lau

Born in 1970, Singapore
Lives and works in New York, New York

My work deals with ideas of immigration, social interaction, and its changes by referencing maps and plans in cities and beyond. The work is mostly shown in interstitial spaces in the museum—the transitional spaces between the formal spaces of the galleries. I also try to draw on source material that has some relationship to the venue of each show. For Los Angeles, what better source than the fabulous map of the City of Angels itself. My project at Berkeley used a series of Central Pacific Railway maps. In New York, I drew n the imagery and language of nautical maps related to the history of immigration in Singapore, where I grew up.

For Los Angeles, the physical map itself is a city within a city. It offers such a diverse make-up of ethnic groups and neighborhoods and yet they all co-exist so closely together like a “crazy quilt.” So the LA piece is, in essence, a celebratory piece, full of color and irregular shapes that interlock together. And a reminder that just like the ephemeral nature of the vinyl that will be destroyed once the show is over, the “glue” that holds our communities together is just as precious and can be equally fragile.

Jiha Moon

Born in 1973, Taegu, Korea
Lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia

As I move through life, living in different places and experiencing various cultures, I imagine places where opposite dreams coexist. I find places that are both peaceful and dangerous, fast and slow, full of old and new.

Sometimes everything looks strange, but there are always traces of the familiar. Signs, flags, and little templates float around, guiding me, but I never know where I am. The landscape is weightless and upside down, as if I was standing on my tiptoes at the edge of a cliff. Wind and water become giant creatures. Who knows if they are friendly or not? They watch me the way my mother’s voice runs through the phone line, becoming rainbow tendrils of tangled vines, coiling through paradise. Time has lost meaning. The world is built of mistakes, spills, stains, and splashes of blue and brown that grow into trees and plants. I am here, convincing myself that I know this place.

Laurel Nakadate

Born in 1975, Austin, Texas
Lives and works in New York, New York

I meet strangers on the street, I go home with them, and we make videos. I create video stories through these chance encounters. I think about the way so many relationships grow out of chance encounters and how we are then asked to trust a stranger and simply go with it—live a life. My videos are a hybrid of documentary photography, pop culture, and a constructed narrative that the strangers and I create minutes before we shoot. The themes I am concerned with are: voyeurism, exhibitionism, discomfort, loneliness, disconnection, longing, wishing, watching, hostility, gullibility, fear, cunning, slapstick, and folly.

I am obsessed with men who live alone with no one to care for them. I am always watching them, because they are invisible people in our culture. They don’t have wives or children; they don’t have anyone to go home to. I think about the desire to be saved from loneliness, the way one life can change another. I think about the lies we tell and the lies we are told. I am fascinated with the ways lives intersect, and the ways the larger disasters of the world meet the personal, quiet terrors of an isolated life. I shoot in strangers’ homes because I am obsessed with the things they accumulate and fill their lives with . . . it’s as if they’re packing a ship for a long and lonely ocean voyage.

My work is also about the hope that something will go right. It is about the absence of bodies that should be there and the fact of the bodies that remain. It is about photography’s ability to record and the way video can describe a story that isn’t easy, obvious, or simple to see.

Kaz Oshiro

Born in 1967, Okinawa, Japan
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

We are living in an environment where we are surrounded by all kinds of objects; these objects often become second nature to us and soon we begin to care less about them. In that sense, objects exist just like the environmental noise that we are no longer sensitive to. John Cage and his friends have argued that even irritating ordinary noise can be valuable, like chamber music with its own will. Their argument recommends putting existing sounds on the same table and proposes that there is an anti-hierarchical sentiment within every sound in the world.

I think I am recomposing objects as “noise” for my environment by using common painter’s materials. I’m interested in these objects I see that at first irritate, then we ignore. I remember and reformat them by using the painter’s vocabulary. Thus, ideally my objects may be placed in any condition at any place without identification that labels the objects as art. Hopefully, my works transcend the chaotic aspect within our ambience as does environmental noise.

Anna Sew Hoy

Born in 1976, Auckland, New Zealand
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California, and New York, New York

I want to present too many physical details, to create an overload of image and texture. Iridescent porcelain erupts from rough redwood bark. A BMX bike frame crashed into a rock expresses movement, envelopment, and momentum. Crushed beer cans, the debris from a drunken party, are strung together to form a tumbleweed. They cast reflections on the shiny surfaces of each other, their crushed sides like the many facets of a disco ball.

The detritus of modern life is organized into something dynamic, energetic, moody, and turbulent. I work by smashing, slapping, and cobbling things together by collage. Any object or material may be used—perfume bottles, sweaters, furniture, toys, or charms. I zoom in on the object and try to give it a new life, realize its potential to be transformed and to achieve new meaning or significance.

In the past, I’ve used the language of Japanese flower arrangement to talk about how I want to arrange objects. But in Ikebana, flowers, leaves, stalks, and branches are arranged to create dynamic and harmonic compositions. I have an eye toward the awkward, the asymmetrical and the irregular, and the will to bring these forms into a disharmonic beauty.

I’ve developed nicknames for these various strains of sculpture: tumbleweeds, dreamcatchers, totem poles, and blobs. They are complex and conflicted, and don’t really look like anything specific. I trust the complexity of the works to unfold over time, and the nicknaming serves as a hook, a marker. My sculptures are conversation pieces, which dialogue on the proliferation of things, visual styles, and cultures.

Jean Shin

Born in 1971, Seoul, Korea
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

My work incorporates and transforms cast-off materials that are familiar to us, such as articles of clothing, umbrellas, and used lottery tickets. The process of making the work is unconventional, enlisting the participation of a larger community of individuals in order to acquire the materials for the work. The finished installation reflects how society collectively relates to these objects as it also connects with a specific space.

I have created a new site-specific installation for Asia Society that examines networks of Asian Americans as well as the complex issues surrounding identity. Unraveling is comprised of sweaters collected from members of the Asian American arts community.

For the first part of the project, I asked each of the curators and organizers of the exhibition to donate one of their knitted sweaters. In turn, they individually invited other artists, museum staff, and members of the Asian American arts community to participate. With each personal request, the project maps a self-defined Asian American arts community. Once gathered, the sweaters were then unraveled and transformed into an elaborate installation at the museum. The name of each participant is printed onto silkscreen labels that are sewn onto the edge of the owner’s deconstructed sweater.

Strands of colorful yarn from the unraveled sweaters form a series of vector lines that delineate a path through the exhibition space. Unraveling is a reflection of our personal connections and the web of relationships we weave through our interactions. As the exhibition travels from one city to another, the artwork and the network it portrays continue to expand as well as transform to fit the architecture of each site.

I would like to thank the approximately one hundred and thirty individuals who contributed their sweaters for this project.

Indigo Som

Born in 1966, San Francisco, California
Lives and works in Berkeley, California

That’s just the way it is.

The severe density of cotton bales, truck-size blocks of solid cotton all mushed together.

After live here twenty years it don’t bother me no more.

You talk to them about Chinese food, they get disgusted, they don’t know nothing about it, but you talk to them about fried chicken they know everything about it.

Maybe, all of us who have listened to the blues, we’ve absorbed a subconscious knowledge of this place, so that when we come here, we recognize it, we know we’re here, in the Mississippi Delta.

It’s amazing how y’all can find this place here from San Francisco, here, all the way down here.

Me? I work seven days a week. Open till close. We open 5 o’clock, we close 9 o’clock at night. 5 o’clock in the morning till 9 o’clock at night. Every day.

Biscuits from a Pillsbury tube plopping into the fryer.

Sesame chicken! Sesame chicken we sell a whole bunch of it, I would say we sell 70% just sesame chicken, just about, yes, and fried rice, that's it.

That feeling of stumbling upon a Chinese restaurant when you least expect it, when you feel far away from anybody or anything Asian.

It’s not really Chinese food, be honest with you, but . . . it’s make a living, that’s what it is.

Yes, ma’am.

[Based on an interview with Van Tran, Flora, Mississippi]

Mika Tajima

Born in 1975, Los Angeles, California
Lives and works in New York, New York

Spanning different genres such as installation, sculpture, video, performance, sound, and furniture design, my work simultaneously employs and subverts particular minimalist and modernist tropes, concepts, and design elements. I employ various strategies that often contradict, and I never favor one over the other—this approach is crucial in my understanding of how we locate ourselves and how we can negotiate seemingly overdetermined situations and structures. Pattern is used as a representation for these systems; form is a shell to be applied and continually replicated towards disintegration.

This convergence of contradictions, reallocations, and unlikely combinations reveals uncertainties and instability. This is most notable in installations that integrate sculpture as furniture, video as wallpaper, sound as sculptural elements, clothes as social sculpture, etc. where elements have multiple identities and unexpected uses.

Through my work I investigate the social function of formalist traditions and its possibilities through my alteration of these practices. My work attempts to find a dislocating place that is familiar—a place that awkwardly has no perfect function, but is a symbol for and an active site where a breakdown occurs.

Saira Wasim

Born in 1975, Lahore, Pakistan
Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois

My work uses the contemporary miniature form to explore social and political issues that divide the modern world. This series—Battle for Hearts and Minds—illustrates the clash between imperialism in the west and fundamentalism in the east, and questions the underlying motivations and uneasy alliances that keep this conflict going.

My work offers a voice against this ignorance and prejudice. It pleas for social justice, respect, and tolerance through the use of caricature and satire.

Set in a puppet theater, The New World Order portrays the staged friendship between the United States, Britain, and their allies in the Muslim world—a show that is produced, written, and directed by the western media.

With a tip of the hat to Norman Rockwell, Ignorance is Bliss illustrates a recent conflict between Western Europe and the Islamic world involving religious freedom and artistic expression.

OIL on Canvas (Operation Iraqi Liberation) is a vaudeville comedy where the president and his advisors are taken by surprise when their search for black gold takes an unexpected turn.

Blood Brothers is a love story set in a desert oasis. It portrays the long-term relationship between President Bush and the Saudi royal family, while in the background the cries of the Muslim common man go unanswered.