Crash Course: Asian-American Artists in the Whitney’s Collection
Select Fridays
3–4 pm
2021
Nam June Paik, Robespierre...Does the Revolution Justify the Violence, 1989. Lithograph, photoetching, aquatint, and engraving, sheet (irregular): 29 13/16 × 22 1/4in. (75.7 × 56.5 cm) Image: 27 1/2 × 20 5/8in. (69.9 × 52.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 94.46.6. © Nam June Paik Estate
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Online, via Zoom
In recognition of AAPI Heritage Month, we are offering a crash course that explores work by Asian diasporic and Asian-American artists from the Whitney's collection. The course will be led via Zoom webinar and participants will be invited to comment and ask questions through a moderated chat.
Participants are welcome to register for one session or both.
Session 1: Art and Social Change
May 21
This session will explore how Asian diasporic and Asian-American artists, such as Eitaro Ishigaki, Isamu Noguchi, Maya Lin, Walid Raad, and the Godzilla Group have engaged with social and geopolitical issues in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that range from colonialism and immigration to issues within the institutions of art itself.
Session 2: Technology and Fantasy
May 28
In the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in increasingly media-saturated and mediated realities. This session explores how Asian diasporic and Asian-American artists such as Nam June Paik, Tala Madani, Anicka Yi, and Xing Danwen have uniquely navigated the transforming landscape of media and technology—from photography to video installations to games—to explore technology’s role in the changing nature of the self and the environment through these experiences.
Xin Wang is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a Ph.D. candidate in modern and contemporary art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, focusing on Soviet hauntology in postmodernism. She has curated and lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Her latest writings have appeared in Art in America, Art Agenda, and Mousse. She is currently planning an exhibition that explores Asian Futurisms for the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City.