Roundtable on Asian American Art: Unicorns Stomping in a Graveyard: The Paradox of Asian American Art (History)

Featuring Susette Min and Joshua Chambers-Letson, this roundtable will explore the complexities of Asian American art through a candid and critical lens, moving beyond traditional acts of recuperation, insistences on ontological framings rooted in inclusion or critique while also resisting romanticized views of Third World activism. Central to our discussion are recent provocations such as the artist Simon Leung who asks whether Asian American art can be considered a theory of democracy? This query prompts us to examine whether this perspective inadvertently transforms Asian American art into a census or population project, where the pressures of inclusion overshadow the necessity of disagreement and friction. Art historian Marci Kwon highlights the ethical dilemma when engaging with Asian American artists—the challenge of respecting, rather than attempting to resolve, the inherent paradoxes in their work. This notion aligns with Susette Min’s exploration in her book Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art, which scrutinizes the limitations and possibilities within the field.

As Asian American art garners increasing attention from institutional and market sectors, there is an urgent need to develop new languages and terminologies that capture its multifaceted nature. At the same time, to what degree is Asian American art an unreal, or perhaps, an undead fiction along the lines Ocean Vuong observes of drag queens in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: as “unicorns stomping in a graveyard.” How do we reconcile with the dead who lie in the open even as new histories attempt to unmoor artists and artworks from the purgatory of being perpetually adjacent to suspect ideations of modernism, “America,” or the “global?”

Joshua Chambers-Letson is the Chair of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Completing a book on queer love and loss for NYU Press (forthcoming 2025), JCL is also the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America; co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok.

Susette Min is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis where she teaches Asian American studies, art history, and cultural studies. She is the author of Unnamable Encounters: the Ends of Asian American Art (NYU, 2018). She is also an independent curator. Formerly, she was the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at The Drawing Center and has curated exhibitions at The Asia Society, Whitney Museum of American Art, apexart, Berkeley Art Museum, Blaffer Art Museum, and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She has published articles in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly, Panorama, Trans-Asia Photography Review, Social Text, Art Journal, Amerasia Journal and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is currently curating an exhibition on Asian American art and writing a book on art, immigration and terrorism.