Curated by Lilly Wei. Featuring works by Emily Cheng, David Diao, Shirley Kaneda, Il Lee, Kikuo Saito, Shen Chen, Barbara Takenaga, Walasse Ting, Richard Tsao, Kim Uchiyama, Robert Yasuda, and Charles Yuen.

“Asian American” became a category in the late 1960s, a grouping assembled by two Asian activist academics at UC Berkeley to foster political solidarity among members of a group that largely avoided such attempts at communal engagement. It was a tumultuous period characterized by clamorous demands for equal rights, widespread antiwar protests, and the ongoing struggles for independence by so-called Third World countries. The time seemed ripe to meld and mobilize a once largely quiescent demographic that was primarily from the Far East. Initially labeled “Oriental,” that descriptive was finally tossed into history’s trash bin (thanks to Edward Said’s fierce critique of the term in his extraordinarily influential 1978 book, Orientalism, although he was referring to the Middle East) and replaced with “Asian American.”

The category of Asian American was meant to stamp people of Asian descent as a group with a shared identity. Yet it also qualified that identity. We never say European American, or White American; they are simply Americans. And there were other problems with the category, chief among them the lack of any great commonality or cohesiveness, as might be expected from artists from a region as vast as Asia, with its diverse populations and cultures. Rather than allies, many were historical enemies, and had been for centuries, even millennia. America, however, was meant to be a place of new beginnings, of reconciliations, new affiliations, and rewritten narratives.

The participants in this exhibition, How Asian Is It, are all (East) Asian American abstract painters of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean descent. All born in the last century, they were shaped by experiences that differ greatly from those of today’s Asian American artists, who view such designations as “Asian American” to be part of community building, networking, even branding, as an ideological, political, and marketing identification. They understand that it is empowering to belong to a community, even an imagined one, with Asian American a larger grouping than Chinese American, Japanese American, or Korean American. Formerly, however, artists—and not just Asian American artists—were warier of categorization by race, ethnicity, gender, and other labels that might be perceived as pejorative or restrictive, fearing that it might further marginalize them. They would not willingly called themselves Asian Americans, although that has now changed.