Appearance is an elusive, fragile thing in diaspora. At a restaurant in Fort Lee, New Jersey, recently, for instance, a server spoke to me in Korean; I’m of Chinese descent. My mixed-race boyfriend is identified as White, Asian, or Latine, depending on the person. That’s the key, in a lot of ways, to The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean, an excellent show at Americas Society: Who’s looking?
For “appearance” has another connotation other than how something looks: It also denotes presence. Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael’s curation here makes it impossible to ignore a truth so obvious it’s often forgotten: that the experience of art is an embodied exchange fundamentally between the work and the viewer. With masterful clarity, the exhibition constantly reminds you of your own positionality within a larger social and physical framework by setting up lines of sight and movement that draw attention to the orientation of your body in the gallery space. In using the framework of “appearance” — ranging from visibility and invisibility to apparitions, impressions, and more, according to the wall text — the curators sidestep a problem endemic to exhibitions on diasporic experiences: essentializing certain facets of an artist’s identity, whether it be their so-called Asian-ness, Latin-American-ness, or some hybrid thereof. The show’s loose curatorial binding — 30 artists from 15 Latin American and Caribbean countries from the 1940s to now — lets these works breathe, allowing them each the agency to exert their particular power.
Japanese-Brazilian artist Lydia Okumura’s “The Appearance” (1975) is the first work you encounter; it’s hung at eye level directly beneath the exhibition title. Each image in the grid has the same background: a peace sign-like configuration of three lines, the bottom wedge of which is darkened. As one “reads” the nine images from left to right, additional line segments appear until the image shifts from flat, abstract image to fully three-dimensional, culminating in the final image of a cube. The exhibition writ large, it suggests, will both induce and require a perspectival shift.
Indeed, turn toward the exhibition and Okumura’s lines will etch themselves like an afterimage onto another strange cube: the gallery you’re standing in. The works in this room extend her vertiginous disruption of space. Spiraling down from the ceiling, Tomie Ohtake’s 2009 untitled sculpture follows another unusual path of movement. Nearby, Esvin Alarcón Lam’s aptly named video work “Apparition (Dragon Piece)” (2017) blocks the most convenient route to the doorway, threatening to trip you from its position on the floor in an assertion of bodily presence: Walk around me, it says. I’m here.
Presence is asserted in many ways throughout this show, not least by absence. I didn’t notice the ambient sound Lam’s work emits until it stopped; then I heard the silence. When it started again, I was paying attention.
This absence as presence is also asserted curatorially. Pass Lam’s work into the next room, and you’ll find yourself before yet another series of cubes, the pedestals of a series of smaller sculptural works by Cecile Chong, Caroline Ricca Lee, David Zink Yi, and others. The curators set these plinths at a diagonal from the orthogonal lines of the gallery so that a full view of the sculptural group is nearly impossible to achieve. From the doorway, for instance, Cisco Merel’s large-scale abstract sculpture “Puerto del Sol (Sun’s Gate)” (2023) is entirely obscured from view, revealing itself only as you move around the room.
The curators continue to disrupt the typical exhibition experience through clever placement of Sandra Nakamura’s massive “Agotar el Ámbito de lo Visible (Exhausting the Scope of the Visible)” (2013), which all but screams at you from another room. The work’s mirrored appearance shifts as you move, both there and not there, like a mirage.
That curatorial burlesque between legibility and illegibility as a method to more forcefully assert presence can be found in the works themselves, too. Lam’s video introduces a Rückenfigur, or a person seen from behind, as in Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818). It’s a formal device that induces a viewer to toggle between imagining oneself as that figure, gazing upon the sublime before them, and as someone behind that figure, wondering what it’s like to be them. In the work, the artist films himself revisiting Chiquimula, Guatemala, the village where his great-grandfather first settled after migrating from Guangzhou, China. He steps into the water and dips in and out of our sight in a ritual that is moving, yet private. The sound of the water, too, alternates between light lapping, melodic dripping, and a kind of gurgling that verges on the human, like something trying to communicate but unable to.
The only miss in this show for me, both artistically and curatorially, is Suwon Lee’s “Time to be Invisible” (2021). It’s a print depicting a clock with phrases like “Time to be Asian” and “Time to be Asian-Latina” in place of numbers. Yes, to reiterate: We are read differently depending on who’s looking at us. It’s hung about a foot higher than every other work in this room, for no discernable reason. If it’s another intervention to tick the viewer’s gaze up, it doesn’t work as well as others do in the show. But this complaint may be a matter of positionality. The work might be mind-blowing to a White American who doesn’t experience the constant renegotiation of their racial legibility across contexts. For me, it’s just another Tuesday, man.
I think I should repeat the salient part of the above: For me. As an Asian diasporic person with no claim to Latin America and the Caribbean, I have a particular kind of personhood that aligns with and deviates from those of the artists included in The Appearance. A work like “No. 1674, Sección Administrativa, Version 1 & 2” (2007–24) by Taiwanese-Costa Rican artist Mimian Hsu perfectly encapsulates that gulf. It’s a large silken bedsheet, hanging from the wall and embroidered with recognizably Chinese motifs such as sparrows and flowers. That iconography is legible to me: I remember my grandmother teaching me to embroider those very flowers as a kid. The Spanish text stitched into its surface is very much not. The wall text provides a translation, and context: It is drawn from a 1907 letter written by a married Chinese couple residing in Costa Rica to its Ministry of the Interior, pleading for his understanding of the pain that the country’s anti-Asian laws caused them and their community. My reliance on the wall text for translation affirms that cultural understanding is a messy thing, even between diasporas with a shared homeland. It requires effort, empathy, and an acceptance that failure is built into that process, but it’s still worth it to try.
When it comes to illuminating a conceit as slippery as diaspora, a show with a premise as complex as Asian artists affiliated with Latin America shown in New York City is the very kind of curatorial work we need. Sharon Mizota and Anna Sew Hoy recently held a dialogue about generational amnesia in this magazine. But if there are gaps in contemporary Asian diasporic understanding due to amnesia, there are also gaps due to lacunae — a relic of navel-gazing to the detriment of fuller understanding, a particular problem for Americans. On a fundamental level, this exhibition is a form of presence. It asserts a body of work that has been overlooked and historically marked in a different way. The work of Afro-Chinese-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam might be the most salient example: It has appeared in 28 exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the titles of which are categorized by medium and as Latin American, large-scale, Surrealist, “art of the forties,” postwar, and more — but never as made by an artist of Asian descent, or affiliated with Asia in any way.
Speaking of repositioning, seeing this show allowed me a bit of distance. It allowed me to consider what Asian diasporic art is and can be from halfway outside the belly of the beast; to better understand it, and by extension, my community and myself.
The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean continues at the Americas Society (680 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through December 14. The exhibition was organized by Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael.
