PASADENA — One fascinating factor about parenting is seeing how your youngsters mix your mannerisms with their publicity to the bigger neighborhood in their very own creating personalities. My five-year-old daughter loves mimicking the dance choreography of Blackpink and is rising up in a time when Okay-pop is a worldwide sensation. My preteen daughter likes to learn, and her private library is crammed with books by Asian-American authors telling tales that middle Asian-American ladies. Each ladies are rising up in a metropolis with the most important Korean diaspora outdoors of Korea. I usually marvel how merely being uncovered to this abundance of Asian our bodies and cultural illustration — an expertise fairly totally different from my very own childhood — is influencing their rising senses of self, particularly their racial identities as combined ethnicity Asian People.
my arms are monsters who consider in magic, curated by Kris Kuramitsu on the Armory Heart for the Arts, options the work of 10 artists from the Asian diaspora. The exhibition focuses on the fragmented nature of id and the round loop of exterior and inside suggestions concerned in self-image creation, with significantly curiosity in how expertise and media feeds into this course of.
This concept is modeled in Miraj Patel’s set up “Indexing” (2025). Right here, a smartphone flashlight shines gentle via a portrait of the artist onto a British photographer’s colonial-period picture of an Indian man, leading to a hybrid during which the artist’s picture is projected onto the colonizer’s abstracting gaze.
Miraj Patel, “Indexing” (2025), cellphone, c-stand, plexiglass, plywood, photographic prints
Amia Yokoyama’s set up “Wyrm Theory” (2025) equally displays this course of: fragmented movies of physique elements and stop-motion-animated clay kinds projected onto an online of porcelain discs and metal wire communicate to how the boundaries between the self, the skin world, and the media we devour can grow to be blurred. This makes it tough to determine the distinction between private choice and the internalization of others’ narratives. The narrator in Diane Severin Nguyen’s video “If Revolution is a Sickness,” which loosely tells the story of a Vietnamese lady in Poland becoming a member of a Okay-pop-inspired dance group, sums this stress up succinctly by asking: “Once I memorize their words, will I lose my voice? Is it true that only a photograph can see inside?” Later within the movie she declares: “I must appear to myself as I wish to appear to others.”
In Jarod Lew’s {photograph} “Blending in Orange” (2024), a presumably Asian determine sporting an orange shirt sits in a row of orange benches. With a view to mix in with the seating, the individual has obscured their face with an orange balaclava, which anonymizes and generalizes them. Notably, the opposite figures within the scene (additionally presumably Asian) are all wearing shades of black and grey, with out their faces obscured. It’s as if the artist is saying that assimilation into one group essentially requires each dissimilating from one other group and a disintegration of self. The determine in orange stares again at us, asserting their company on this efficiency of each assimilation and self-obliteration.
Maybe in the long run the one genuine Asian-American id is private and individualized. In different phrases, we are able to solely actually mix in with our selves. The paradox is that this particular person authenticity can solely be envisioned and visual within the context of and in response to others — our household and our communities, and thru the representations and narratives we devour.
Amia Yokoyama, “Wyrm Theory” (2025), porcelain discs, mirror, video projection, metal wire, aluminum crimps
Guanyu Xu 徐冠宇, “Worlds within Worlds” (2019), archival pigment print
Set up view of Leonard Suryajaya, “Press Conference” (2023), archival pigment print
Set up view of images by Tommy Kha
Set up view of Maggie Lee, “Daughter” (2016), colour, sound 4:27 minutes
Alex Anderson, “I like your ring. Can I have it?” (2023), earthenware, glaze, gold luster
Cathy C. Lu, “Peach with Hair” (2022), stoneware, glaze, gold luster, artificial hair
The creator and his daughter watching Diane Severin Nguyen’s “If Revolution Is a Sickness” (2021), 4k video: colour and sound, 18:53 minutes (photograph Elizabeth Tien)
my arms are monsters who consider in magic continues on the Armory Heart for the Arts (145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, California) via December 14. The exhibition was curated by Kris Kuramitsu.
