PASADENA, CA.- USC Pacific Asia Museum is presenting Intervention: Fresh Perspectives after 50 Years. The exhibition brings together seven Asian American artists and scholars who created new artworks that provide new ways to view and engage with the museum’s history and collection of Asian and Pacific Island art. The participating Asian diasporic artists are Antonius Bui, Audrey Chan, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Amir Fallah, Akiko Jackson, Alan Nakagawa, and kate-hers RHEE.

“As we celebrate USC PAM’s 50th anniversary, we look to the future by asking questions and reflecting on our past as it is embodied in the museum’s collection. Intervention offers an opportunity for institutional critique while acknowledging all that the museum has achieved over its 50-year history. The exhibition expands on USC PAM’s groundbreaking legacy, which includes being the first museum in North America to mount an exhibition on contemporary Chinese art with its 1987 show Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China. As well as the first museum to assemble an exhibition of Aboriginal art in the United States with The Past and Present Art of the Australian Aborigine in 1980. We look forward to continuing to present boundary-breaking exhibitions for the next 50 years,” said Bethany Montagano, Director, USC Museums.

“The artworks commissioned for this exhibition create new ways to view the museum’s collection and serve to remind visitors that USC PAM’s history is complex. Our public has many ways to consider this story beyond how it is presented in our galleries. The artists and their fresh perspectives are asking viewers to ponder for who was this collection created and how does its meaning change when seen through the eyes of our diverse communities?” said Rebecca Hall, Curator, USC Pacific Asia Museum.

THE ARTISTS

Antonius-Tín Bui (they/them)

Antonius-Tín Bui has a contagious thirst for life that informs their poly-disciplinary creations. Using both installation and hand cut paper creations to navigate a space often reserved for predominantly white, heterosexual, cisgender people, Bui employs beauty as a refuge for fellow marginalized communities. Bui’s installation for Intervention includes cut paper portraits and an installation to welcome visitors into the museum space.

Audrey Chan (she/her)

Audrey Chan’s research-based projects use drawing, painting, video, and public art to challenge dominant historical narratives through allegories of power, place, and identity. Chan mined PAM’s permanent gallery and collection to explore personal connections to Asian art. Utilizing her unique point of view and playful illustrative style, Chan is creating a newspaper for PAM’s visitors. Available in the galleries during the full run of Intervention, the newspaper borrows from the Chinese American community newspapers Chan remembers from her youth.




Jennifer Ling Datchuk (she/her)

Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s body of work reflects cultural identity as an Asian American woman. She uses her artwork to question the cultural, political, and economic systems that maintain a status quo of sexism, racism, stereotyping, and oppression. For Intervention, Datchuk is examining and expanding upon representations of women in Asian art.

Amir H. Fallah (he/him)

Amir H. Fallah’s layered paintings question cultural systems and the symbols we use to connect to our lives and to each other. He encourages viewers to contemplate the psychological space of borders, identities, and histories. Fallah’s large painting for Intervention draws from the USC PAM collection to trace the interconnected histories that are revealed in objects. Through his juxtaposition of historic and contemporary images, Fallah challenges deeply held assumptions about geography and culture by creating new connections.

Akiko Jackson (she/her)

Akiko Jackson is a visual artist with an emphasis on sculpture and installation. She uses affordable and discarded material specifically chosen to reference cultural memory, time, place, and body. Jackson utilizes materials and process to embrace cultural identity and the preservation of tradition. Influenced by ancient Japanese rituals and shrines to commemorate the dead, Jackson’s ethereal installation for Intervention, made with hair, explores the disconnect we feel in the face of loss.

Alan Nakagawa (he/him)

Working from a semi-autobiographical perspective, Alan Nakagawa explores history and archives to create poignant work tying the present to the past. Nakagawa is the “orphan objects” collection at USC PAM. Nakagawa’s compassion for these objects has led him to construct tamashiP, a medium-scaled model of a space vessel that carries the souls of orphaned objects in the USC Pacific Asia Museum collection into outer space and to a parallel universe where objects with unknown histories can live in peace. This work looks to Japanese funeral traditions, cinema, and science fiction entertainment for inspiration.

kate-hers RHEE (she/her)

Working primarily in performance, installation, and participatory interventions, kate-hers RHEE’s work engages with post-colonial discourses surrounding collecting practices, artifact exhibition and Othering encounters. For Intervention, RHEE is creating a site-specific installation titled The Postcolonial Afterlives of Han, a collection of objects dealing with the issues of death and mourning. RHEE arranges self-made items, to incorporate her current research into transnational collection practices and display histories. Focusing on the Korean historical context together with the current global coronavirus pandemic, RHEE combines high and low materials that evoke burial, impermanence, nobility, caste, and the afterlife.