For centuries, art history has wheeled and dealed in the myth of the artistic genius solitarily toiling away in the studio. But a number of recent exhibitions have looked at the ways in which networks and communities have been essential to the development of artists and their practices. The latest of these comes in the form of “Scratching at the Moon,” an exhibition that looks at an intergenerational cohort of 13 Asian American artists with deep ties to Los Angeles at the Institute of Contemporary Art in downtown LA.
The exhibition—curated by artist Anna Sew Hoy and ICA director Anne Ellegood, and on view through July 28—is also the first survey to focus on Asian Americans in a mainstream museum in LA, a city that has historically turned its head from focusing on Asian artists, as chronicled in an eye-opening essay by curator John Tain included in the catalog for the show. In her own essay, Sew Hoy attributes her inspiration for the show to that blinkered past as well as the rise in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic and, most importantly, the necessary work of “holding up and naming our community in the hope of bringing our work into focus.” As she writes, “an artist might be an individual working in a studio, but much of our important and joyful work is with and for others.”
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The threads of the exhibition start in many ways with artist Young Chung, an LA-area mentor whose founding of leading LA gallery Commonwealth and Council in 2010 has left an indelible mark on the city’s art scene but whose own work has gone undershown. In “Scratching at the Moon,” Chung is showing several black-and-white portraits, from 1996, of family members, both given and chosen—with the latter represented by a tender image of Yong Soon Min, Chung’s then-teacher at the University of California, Irvine, and a founding member of the artist collective Godzilla. Chung titled the series “Not By Birth,” and in each of the images, the sitters have one or more ink stamps, of lady bugs or seahorses; Min’s face and neck explode with these stamps, a sign of the strength of their familial connection. The photo of Min carries the simple title of Ssaem, an informal team for “teacher” in Korean, and it carries even more significance after Min’s passing earlier this month.
Nearby is Min’s own photographic series “Defining Moments” (1992) that takes up her connections to personal and geopolitical histories. The six-work series begins with a silhouette of Min’s torso, with HEARTLAND written across her chest and OCCUPIED TERRITORY across her arms; important dates swirl around her belly button, relating to the Korean War, the Gwangju Massacre, the artist’s own birth, and her emigration to the US. In the panels that follow are closely cropped self-portraits, with DMZ (for demilitarized zone) marked onto her forehead and images from recent Korean history superimposed onto her face. Min seems to say that the traces of history are never the far from us. They are, in fact, constituent parts of our bodies and minds.
Reminders of the past recur in other works on view in this heartfelt exhibition. Amanda Ross-Ho presents an installation that is dedicated to her artist father Ruyell Ho, who came to California in 1955 and created his portfolio by photographing everyday objects—wine glasses, pearls, a cast-iron skillet, a mousetrap, nail polish—found around the house. Ross-Ho tracked several of these down and displayed them, like a still life of her father’s own traces, on a table similar to one from her childhood.
One of the show’s most moving moments comes in a video installation by Na Mira that works to bring her friend, the late artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, into the present. One video shows a woman—seemingly a stand-in for Cha—navigating the spiral of a parking garage, with her image reflected in a mirror that rests on the floor. She is both here and there, residing in a new liminal space. Another video shows mysterious and poetic words that are illegible until viewed in the mirror, while recitations of them play on a nearby radio that seems to be broadcast from another realm.
Another highlight is Dean Sameshima’s Traces (no.1), a photo series documenting various gay bars and clubs across Los Angeles with records of things like a solicitation for sex scrawled inside a crude drawing of a penis on a bathroom stall. Because the photograph was taken in the ’90s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, but only printed last year, time seems to collapse. What was there back then is, more than likely, gone today.
