There isn't an Asian American aesthetic in contemporary art. There are lots of Asian American artists, but there is no singular, unitary guiding principle for how the art those artists make ought to look, never mind what its subjects should be.
Why should there be? Merely on a practical level, an American artist whose ancestry is traced to the Philippines is very different from one traced to Vietnam, Pakistan or Singapore. And Filipinos might be Chinese, indigenous, Spanish or another ethnicity. The ethnic cultural differences among artists, beyond checking the same Asian American box on some official form, are likely to be at least as great as any similarities.
So does it make sense for a museum exhibition to use Asian American identity as its organizing principle? Based on "One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now," which ends a 20-month tour at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo on May 4, the answer is yes.
In the 1990s, the assumption that minority artists ought to make their specific social, political and cultural status the subject of their work thankfully began to fall apart. This exhibition shows it's just one possibility. That's progress.
The show is a bit wobbly, with a considerable amount of work that doesn't yet feel fully formed. (Most of the artists are in their 30s.) But it's got a great title. "One Way or Another," Blondie's 1978 New Wave pop-disco-punk-reggae hit song, is suitably hybrid, not to mention cheekily aggressive in its "gonna get ya' " refrain. It also dates from the decade when all but one of the 17 artists was born.
How does that generation differ from what came before? Pop culture is part of the answer -- but only part. It's a generational marker for these artists, selected by a curatorial team that included JANM's Karin Higa, Melissa Chu of New York's Asia Society and UC Davis professor Susette S. Min. Six are based in New York, five in Los Angeles, four in the Bay Area and the remaining two in Chicago and Atlanta.
There's no pure abstraction in the show. Geraldine Lau's cut and pieced vinyl wall mural at the entry is perhaps the closest, although its small interlocking blocks of color plainly refer to population patterns in urban maps. Mika Tajima's visually inert cube of slatted wood and plastic is an artifact from a live electronic music performance, which plays on a nearby video monitor. Landscapes in Chinese brush painting undergird Jiha Moon's cascading torrents of blue paint.
