Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art
Redraws the contours of Asian American art, attempting to free it from a categorization that stifles more than it reveals.
Charting its historical conditions and the expansive contexts of its emergence, Susette Min challenges the notion of Asian American art as a site of reconciliation or as a way for marginalized artists to enter into the canon or mainstream art scene. Pressing critically on the politics of visibility and how this categorization reduces artworks by Asian American artists within narrow parameters of interpretation, Unnamable reconceives Asian American art not as a subset of objects, but as a medium that disrupts representations and embedded knowledge. By approaching Asian American art in this way, Min refigures the way we see Asian American art as an oppositional practice, less in terms of its aspirations to be seen--its greater visibility--and more in terms of how it models a different way of seeing and encountering the world.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
"In her exquisitely perceptive approach to art and curation, Susette Min turns the category of Asian American art on its head. The artists surveyed in Unnamable wrestle with the 'predicament' of being categorized as an Asian American artist. Through textured, impeccably-researched, and richly-rendered examinations of their works, Min curates these avant garde practitioners into delightful group shows focused on the themes of labor, practices of gleaning, and the disappearing body of the Asian/American artist. A provocative challenge to liberal multiculturalism's fetish for and diminishment of ethnic and/or minority artists, Unnamable reformulates the category of Asian American art, and by doing so, revitalizes its enclosing structure."-Rachel C. Lee, author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America
