April 25 – June 30, 2013
Albert Chong, Portrait of the Artist as a Victim of Colonial Mentality, 1979/2010. Photo transfer on marble tiles. Courtesy of the artist
Mequitta Ahuja, Dream Region, 2009. Oil, enamel, acrylic and waxy chalk on paper. Collection of Greg Shannon
Adrienne Pao, Lei Stand Protest / Lei Pua Kapa, from the series “Hawaiian Cover-Ups,” 2004. LightJet print. Courtesy of the artist
Kip Fulbeck, The Hapa Project, 2006. Digital Print. Courtesy of the artist
As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation comes of age in a contemporary world fixated on post-raciality and moving beyond issues of identity, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art examines how artists engage various facets of hybridity in their artwork. This exhibition brings together works by nineteen mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists selected both for the quality of their work and for their approaches to the identities and experiences of mixed Asian Americans, mixed Pacific Islander Americans, and Asian transracial adoptees. While their biographies are varied and often diverge significantly from the dominant discourses of mixed Asian identities, their lives are shaped by specific histories of Asian Pacific-U.S. collisions: narratives of war, economic and political migration, and colonization.
This exhibition was curated by Laura Kina, Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University, and Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.