About the Discussion:
This panel is held in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and all those globally denouncing systems of oppression, racism, and police brutality. We are vested in the global rebellion precipitated by George Floyd’s killing. As long as some groups are more vulnerable to violence and death than others, we will not be able to realize our full collective humanity or achieve racial justice.
In light of the pandemic, the pre-existing dysfunction within many systems and their leadership are magnified and racial, gender, and class inequalities exacerbated. The yellow woman’s body, historically rendered either invisible or as “object,” is now catapulted into hypervisibility amidst xenophobic questions of contagion, virility, and a history of scapegoatism.
Asian women occupy a precarious racial embodiment within their art practices and Western contemporary art, regularly experiencing institutional racism and tokenism. Their presence within the art world often produces a racial wedge between whiteness and other people of colour.
In conversation with Pearl C Hsiung, Maia Ruth Lee, Astria Suparak, Stephanie Syjuco, Hồng-Ân Trương, and Christine Tien Wang, host stephanie mei huang invites all to hear from six Asian women artists on reckoning with a racialized and gendered spectrum of visibility, moving through their practices with and of yellow embodiment, and the possibility of racial (or transgressively, non-racial) alternatives.
Convened by stephanie mei huang with Pearl C Hsiung, Maia Ruth Lee, Astria Suparak, Stephanie Syjuco, Hồng-Ân Trương, and Christine Tien Wang as part of Contemporary Calgary’s Collider residency May 1 - June 15, 2020.