Essays
How Do Asian American Photographers Envision New Possibilities for the Future?
Stephanie Hueon Tung, guest editor of Aperture's summer 2023 issue, on the artists confronting the tensions between past and present—and what it means to be Asian in America.
Courtesy the artist
In the summer of 1953, Charles Wong’s photo-essay “1952 / The Year of the Dragon” was published in the fifth issue of Aperture. The impetus for Wong’s piece—a carefully designed sequence of photography and poetry—was an extortion scheme that had plagued the immigrant community in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The perpetrators peppered vulnerable immigrants with fake notices about kidnapped family members in China. Cut off from communication by the Communist Revolution, many of the scheme’s victims opted to pay an expensive ransom, while others made the difficult decision to forsake their loved ones to imagined captors. The themes of Wong’s work—immigrant displacement, vulnerability, memory, and intergenerational trauma—reveal wounds of the Asian American immigrant experience that feel no less raw today. Wong’s piece might be read as a statement about the impossible choices and pain of forgetting that building a new life in this country continually demands.
© the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
As guest editor of this issue of Aperture, I have found solace and inspiration, throughout my research, in seeing how generations of artists have used the medium of photography to grapple with questions of visibility, belonging, and what it means to be Asian American. Just as there is no single point where Asian American experience converges, photography produced by Asian American image makers encompasses disparate ways of viewing the world—and demands to be approached as such. But to seek connection and coherence among these perspectives is to acknowledge a shared story of immigration to the United States that relates to a long legacy of exclusionary policies and struggles for recognition and citizenship. Being and becoming Asian in America is an unfixed, constantly evolving, and expansive process, and photography plays an essential role in envisioning it.
Since the first Asian immigrants arrived in America in the mid-nineteenth century, social visibility has conferred vulnerability. Our modern-day system of passport controls was based upon nineteenth-century forms of visual policing developed specifically to regulate the movement of Chinese and Japanese bodies, the first national methods of biometric identification to utilize photography. Falling under the gaze of the camera was an experience shared by most Asian immigrants, not primarily as a hobby of self-documentation or leisure but as a bureaucratic fact of racialized surveillance and policing. Under the threat of deportation or detention, many early immigrants opted for self-effacement and erasure as strategies for survival. A daguerreotype from 1850s California that shows a young, working-class Chinese woman cradling a picture of an absent loved one in her hand is a rare exception. The dearth of historical photographs portraying Asian men and women at ease speaks to contested ideas of place, identity, and belonging that continue to shape our collective image of the United States.
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The author Ocean Vuong once identified a generational divide in the aspirations of Asian Americans. To paraphrase Vuong, first-generation immigrants saw life in America as such a privilege that they were content to put their heads down, work, fade into the background, and live a quiet life—so much so that they expected their children to do the same. But with the second generation, there came a desire to be seen. A great paradox for these children of immigrants, many of whom seek agency and self-expression through art, was that they betrayed their parents in order to subversively fulfill their parents’ dreams.
This issue provides an opportunity to discover generative ways of seeing that are rooted in connection and empathy.
For this younger generation of artists and immigrants, the desire for visibility is about more than individual self-fulfillment. It arises from a want to understand a past that continues to act on us and forms part of who we are but remains unspoken and closed off from view. This phantom pain of forgetting creates its own particular sense of loss—so clearly articulated in Wong’s piece—that marks where immigrant hopes intersect with intergenerational melancholy. Whether one arrived generations ago or today, being Asian American requires coming to terms with absences, omissions, and silences, as well as with the complications of human choices that entail various acts of abandonment. It involves negotiating the in-betweenness of here and there, past and future, breaks of language and culture—or, as the creators of the recent film Everything Everywhere All at Once imagine it, multiverses that can fracture a sense of self across infinite chains of unrealized possibilities.
Courtesy Corky Lee Estate
Courtesy the artist; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
This issue of Aperture explores the myriad ways in which Asian American image makers have approached questions of visibility and belonging on their own terms. They create works that reveal the full complexity and diversity of stories that make the experience of being Asian in America. They creatively navigate the tension between being seen and unseen as strategies of survival, play, and reclamation, from the pursuit of anonymity or effacement during times of exclusion to self-fashioning and commemoration. And in the spirit of the late photographer and activist Corky Lee, they are working toward what he called “photographic justice” by exploring areas of hope, celebration, and connection alongside doubt, uncertainty, and sorrow across generations. What comes into view in these pages is not a single story or image but a kaleidoscopic refracting of shared patterns and impressions that is connected to the specifics of an evolving Asian American identity and its potential.
How might we acknowledge the invisible wounds of US warfare and imperialism in Asia? Artists have employed diverse approaches to reflect the trauma inscribed on our bodies and psyches, from landscape to portraiture, abstraction, and conceptual practices. Toyo Miyatake’s photographs show the mundane highs and lows of Japanese Americans’ daily lives while interned during World War II at the Manzanar concentration camp in California. They are testaments to the resilience of a community and the ways in which art perseveres even in the darkest hours. In reenactments of Vietnam War battles, An-My Lê draws on the landscape tradition to investigate how history seeps into the present. Yong Soon Min explores the emotional terrain of displacement in self-portraiture that marks the body as a repository for personal and national histories. And while both Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and Stephanie Syjuco turn to archives for source material, their projects pursue different ends: Matthew’s animations collapse time by merging immigrant family photographs from different generations in an act of suturing or repair; Syjuco calls attention to the evidence gathered to quantify, categorize, and understand the Philippines in order to question the unseen power structures still embedded in national archives and museums today.
Family is central to the stories of Asian American lives, but what new visions of our loved ones—what entirely different multiverses, of what could have been and what is possible for the future—might emerge from the push-pull of picture making? In the early 1960s, the Low family in New York City used cut and paste to create an ideal world in which family members separated by immigration policies are reunited in one image. In the same vein, Leonard Suryajaya’s theatrical tableaux and Guanyu Xu’s layered domestic spaces are filled with symbols of hope, history, and affection. From the vibrant, dignified portraits taken at May’s Photo Studio in the early to mid-twentieth century to Michael Jang’s wryly observant photographs of his suburban family in the 1970s and the haunting series Half Self-Portraits made collaboratively by Tommy Kha and his mother in the beginning of this century, photography acts as a prism, allowing us to glimpse the dazzling humor, ambitions, desires, and regrets of our expanded families and ourselves.
Courtesy the Museum of Chinese in America Collection
Courtesy the artist
Reconciling this yearning to be seen—to find meaning, be acknowledged, and, finally, belong—with the habits of opacity is part of the process of being and becoming Asian in America. It has taken me time to realize that there is agency and subjectivity in both positions. That there are emotions that cannot be expressed or articulated but are deeply felt. Photography has the ability to help us navigate what we choose to bring to the surface and what we hold back. It can address losses that are difficult to name by making visible, with attention and respect, the actions and concerns of previous generations. Perhaps it is this fundamental act of care that will aid us in moving from personal experience to greater collective action and solidarity.
It is my hope that this issue provides an opportunity to discover generative ways of seeing that are rooted in connection and empathy. It is through the work of artists that we can change our perceptions of the past and heal generational wounds.
In seeing one another and recognizing the beauty and creativity of these endeavors, we take part in a project of reclaiming agency and humanity.
Charles Wong is now over a hundred years old and still living with his partner, the photographer Irene Poon, in San Francisco. It has been seventy years since his photo-essay was published in Aperture. The two don’t have cell phones or email, but Wong sent a handwritten note on the occasion of this issue: “This is a brave project, and is heading into the 2024 elections. We are with you.”
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.”