Readings from Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts 

Tuesday, May 25th, 7pm (PST)

HRLA celebrates the release of the new book Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts, edited by Christopher K. Ho and Daisy Nam. This is an online event with readings from contributors, including Jesse Chun, Josh Kline, Kim Nguyen, Christine Y. Kim, John Tain, C. Spencer Yeh.

Register in advance for this meeting

https://ucr.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYocuqqrDksE9zYjHOJf6M3DfMkowFM_wpL 

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This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model-minority myth. Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, these letters ignite new ways of being, and modes of creating, at a moment of racial reckoning.

With Contributions By: 

Aily Nash and Sylvia Schedelbauer, Ajay Kurian, Alexander Lau, Anicka Yi, Anne Anlin Cheng, Anoka Faruqee, Aruna D’Souza, Asad Raza, Brendan Fernandes, Brian Kuan Wood, Byron Kim, C. Spencer Yeh, Candice Lin, Cathy Park Hong, Celine Wong Katzman, CFGNY, Chitra Ganesh and Sung Hwan Kim, Chris Wu, Christine Y. Kim, Dawn Chan, Furen Dai, Hera Chan, Herb Tam, Holly Shen, Hồng-Ân Trương, Howie Chen, Hyperlink Press, Iftikhar Dadi, J Fan, j.p. mot, Jean Shin, Jen Liu, Jesse Chun, Jessica Hong, Jia Tolentino, John Tain, John Yau, Josh Kline, Ka-Man Tse, Ken Lum, Kenneth Tam, Kim Nguyen, Luke Luokun Cheng, Lumi Tan, Maia Chao, Marc Handelman, Marci Kwon, Margaret Lee, Martha Tuttle, Martin Wong, Mary Lum, Matthew Shen Goodman, Megha Ralapati, Mel Chin, Michelle Lopez, Mimi Wong, Mo Kong, Naeem Mohaiemen and Yara El-Sherbini, Pamela M. Lee, Patrick Jaojoco, Patty Chang, Paul Pfeiffer, Philip Poon, Prem Krishnamurthy, Ralph Pugay, Sarah McCaffery, Zheng Shengtian, WangShui, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Tausif Noor, Vinay Hira, Yayoi Shionoiri, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

URL: https://shop.nplusonemag.com/collections/featured/products/best-letters-from-asian-americans-in-the-arts

Readers Bios

Jesse Chun is an artist working and living in New York, NY. Chun’s work has been presented internationally at SculptureCenter, New York, NY; the Queens Museum, New York, NY; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, NY; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Toronto, Canada; Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada; and the Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul, South Korea, among others. Her recent digital and print publications include WORKBOOK (New York: Triple Canopy, 2019); Intangible Heritage (Brooklyn: Wendy’s Subway x BAM, 2018). Chun’s work is in public collections including the Whitney Museum Library, New York, NY; Artist Book Collection, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Archive of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution,Washington, DC; Yale University Library, New Haven, CT; and Asia Art Archive in America, New York, NY. 

Christine Y. Kim is Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA. Her recent exhibitions include Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination (2015 – 2016); My Barbarian: Double Agency (2015); James Turrell: A Retrospective (2013 – 2014), which won first place for the Best Monographic Museum Exhibition in the US by the International Art Critics Association in 2014; and Teresa Margolles, an outdoor sculpture project in collaboration with the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, a nonprofit organization for public art which she cofounded in 2009. Prior to her post at LACMA, Kim was Associate Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2000 – 2008), in New York, NY, where she organized exhibitions such as Kehinde Wiley, The World Stage: Africa Lagos-Dakar (2008), Flow (2008), Philosophy of Time Travel (2007), Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra (2007), Black Belt (2003), and Africaine (2002); and surveys Frequency (2005) and Freestyle (2001) with Thelma Golden. Kim’s recent exhibitions at LACMA include Isaac Julien: Playtime (2019) and Julie Mehretu: A Survey (2019).

Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York. His art has been exhibited internationally, including in solo exhibitions at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway; Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Modern Art, London, UK; and 47 Canal, New York, NY. In 2019, Kline’s work was shown in the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York, NY; The Body Electric at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. In 2021, he will have a solo exhibition at LAXArt, Los Angeles, CA.

Kim Nguyen is a writer and curator based in San Francisco, CA, where she is Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. She has curated exhibitions, projects, and programs with a wide range of artists, including Maia Cruz Palileo, Jeffrey Gibson, Hồng-Ân Trương, Cinthia Marcelle, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Abbas Akhavan, and Ken Lum. Between 2019 and 2020, Nguyen led the Wattis’s sixth research season, which was dedicated to the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues and periodicals nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Emerging Curator of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Joan Lowndes Award from the Canada Council for the Arts for excellence in critical and curatorial writing. She is currently working on her first collection of writings—a series of texts on alienation, art, and the long goodbye.

Spencer Yehis recognized for interdisciplinary activities as an artist, improviser, and composer, as well as for his music project Burning Star Core. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, and he is a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine and Triple Canopy. Yeh has also been a longtime programmer and trailer editor for the microcinema Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY. His exhibitions and presentations include Shocking Asia, Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; Two Workaround Works Around Calder, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Modern Mondays and David Tudor’s Forest Speech, MoMA, New York, NY; Sound Horizon, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tarek Atoui: Organ Within, Kurimanzutto and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The World Is Sound, the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY; Mei-Jia & Ting-Ting & Chih-fu & Sin-Ji, MoCA, Cleveland,OH, Closer to the Edge, Singapore; Crossing Over, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, The Moon Represents My Heart: Music Memory and Belonging, the Museum of Chinese in America, New York, NY; and Inner Ear Vision: Sound As Medium, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE. Yeh was a 2019 grant recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. The RCA Mark II, a project on vinyl record, was released by Primary Information in 2017.

John Tain is Head of Research at Asia Art Archive, where he leads a team based in Hong Kong, New Delhi, and Shanghai. He was the curator of Crafting Communities, an exhibition on the Thai-based Womanifesto initiative, on view at AAA in the summer and fall 2020. In 2018, he co-curated an exhibition for the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, India, and, with Jasmine Alinder, the exhibition Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Someday, Chicago for the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, IL, as part of the Terra Foundation’s Art Design Chicago. Among his other projects, he co-convened MAHASSA (Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, 2019–2020), a collaboration with the Dhaka Art Summit and the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University, and serves as a series editor for Afterall’s Exhibition Histories, the most recent volume of which is Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Flash Art, Art Review Asia, and elsewhere. He was previously a curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, CA.

This event has been supported by GYOPO, and UC Riverside