Queering Contemporary Asian American Art takes Asian American differences as its point of departure, and brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. Taken together, these nine original artist interviews, cutting-edge visual artworks, and seven critical essays explore contemporary currents and experiences within Asian American art, including the multiple axes of race and identity, queer bodies and forms, kinship and affect, and digital identities and performances. Using the verb and critical lens of “queering” to capture transgressive cultural, social, and political engagement and practice, the contributors to this volume explore the connection points in Asian American experience and cultural production of surveillance states, decolonization and diaspora, transnational adoption, and transgender bodies and forms, as well as heteronormative respectability, the military, and war. The interdisciplinary and theoretically informed frameworks in the volume engage readers to understand global and historical processes through contemporary Asian American artistic production.

In Unsettled Visions, the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of contemporary Asian American visual art. Machida focuses on works produced during the watershed 1990s, when surging Asian immigration had significantly altered the demographic, cultural, and political contours of Asian America, and a renaissance in Asian American art and visual culture was well underway. Machida conducted extensive interviews with ten artists working during this transformative period: women and men of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese descent, most of whom migrated to the United States. In dialogue with the artists, Machida illuminates and contextualizes the origins of and intent behind bodies of their work. Unsettled Visions is an engrossing look at a vital art scene and a subtle account of the multiple, shifting meanings of “Asianness” in Asian American art. Analyses of the work of individual artists are grouped around three major themes that Asian American artists engaged with during the 1990s: representations of the Other; social memory and trauma; and migration, diaspora, and sense of place. Machida considers the work of the photographers Pipo Nguyen-duy and Hanh Thi Pham, the printmaker and sculptor Zarina Hashmi, and installations by the artists Tomie Arai, Ming Fay, and Yong Soon Min. She examines the work of Marlon Fuentes, whose films and photographs play with the stereotyping conventions of visual anthropology, and prints in which Allan deSouza addresses the persistence of Orientalism in American popular culture. Machida reflects on Kristine Aono’s museum installations embodying the multigenerational effects of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and on Y. David Chung’s representations of urban spaces transformed by migration in works ranging from large-scale charcoal drawings to multimedia installations and an “electronic rap opera.”

War Baby / Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with 19 emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai'i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of "optional identity," this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures. This multiauthor volume features a foreward by Kent A. Ono, a co-authored preface and introductory essay by the editors, 19 original artist interviews conducted by the editors, and original essays from Wei Ming Dariotis and the contributing authors: Camilla Fojas, Stuart Gaffney, Rudy Guevarra, Jr., Eleana J. Kim, Richard Lou, Margo Machida, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Lori Pierce, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Ken Tanabe, and Wendy Thompson-Taiwo. Laura Kina is associate professor of art, media, and design at DePaul University. Wei Ming Dariotis is associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. "War Baby / Love Child is an interesting, original, and innovative project that expands the field of Asian American studies by using visual art as a point of entry and analysis for the discipline." -Mark Johnson, editor of Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 "One of the strengths of this original volume is its holistic combination of interviews with premier fine artists along with the textual, historical, and scholarly context provided by established and emerging scholars in Asian American Studies." -Nitasha Sharma, author of Hip Hop Desis: South Americans, Blackness, and Global Race Consciousness

Why Asia?: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art is a ground-breaking investigation into two overlapping and rapidly emerging areas in contemporary art. The book consists of lucid discussions on individual artists, exhibitions and theoretical issues. With over sixty illustrations it serves to introduce the current landscape of Asian and Asian American Art, with essays on art in China, Taiwan and North America, as well as individual essays on leading artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Xu Bing and Michael Joo. Above all, Yang explores the challenges that contemporary Asian and Asian American art poses to artists, critics, curators and viewers alike. In particular, she reflects on the complexities of exhibition practice, the role of identity politics in arts, the unspoken assumptions of Western critics faced with Asian art, and the difficulties faced by artists working between cultures.

Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes chronicles the blossoming of Asian American art and anticipates the growing democratization of American art and culture. Pairing work by twenty-four contemporary Asian American visual artists with responses provocatively drawn from cultural critics, other artists, activists, and intellectuals, this book explores themes of geographical movement, the sexuality of Asian bodies, colonization, miscegenation, hybrid forms of immigrant cultures, the loss of home, war, history, and memory. Elaine H. Kim's historical introduction charts the trajectory of Asian American art from the nineteenth century to the present, offering a comprehensive account of artists, major artworks, and major events. Commentaries by writers, artists, and cultural activists examine the work of visual artists such as Pacita Abad, Albert Chong, Y. David Chung, Allan deSouza, Michael Joo, Hung Liu, Yong Soon Min, Manuel Ocampo, PipoNguyen-Duy, Roger Shimomura, Carlos Villa, and Martin Wong. Prominent artists and critics such as Homi K. Bhabha, Luis Camnitzer, Enrique Chagoya, Gina Dent, Ellen Gallagher, Arturo Lindsay, Kobena Mercer, Griselda Pollock, Jolene Rickard, Faith Ringgold, Ella Shohat, Lowery Stokes Sims, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie offer thought-provoking reflections on each artist. Sharon Mizota's extended captions further elucidate the paintings, graphics, photography, installations, and mixed-media constructions under discussion. As a set of dialogues, simultaneously visual and textual, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes encourages the cross-cultural conversation that is shaping the emerging art of Asian Americans and of the United States in general. Alternately personal, intellectual, aesthetic, and political, these essays and the art they consider provide unique perspectives on both the past and the future of American art.

Contemporary popular culture stereotypes Filipina women as sex workers, domestic laborers, mail order brides, and caregivers. These figures embody the gendered and sexual politics of representing the Philippine nation in the Filipina/o diaspora. Gina K. Velasco explores the tensions within Filipina/o American cultural production between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and popular nationalism as a form of resistance to neoimperialism and globalization. Using a queer diasporic analysis, Velasco examines the politics of nationalism within Filipina/o American cultural production to consider an essential question: can a queer and feminist imagining of the diaspora reconcile with gendered tropes of the Philippine nation? Integrating a transnational feminist analysis of globalized gendered labor with a consideration of queer cultural politics, Velasco envisions forms of feminist and queer diasporic belonging, while simultaneously foregrounding nationalist movements as vital instruments of struggle.

Paris Review Staff Pick A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness—how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness. "Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology." —Publishers Weekly "Franny Choi combines technology and poetry to stunning effect." –BUSTLE “…these beautiful, fractal-like poems are meditations on identity and autonomy and offer consciousness-expanding forays into topics like violence and gender, love and isolation.” –NYLON