Exhibition: Scratching at the Moon

Curated by artist Anna Sew Hoy and ICA LA Executive Director Anne Ellegood, Scratching at the Moon is the first focused survey of Asian American artists in a Los Angeles contemporary art museum. The exhibition celebrates the work of an intergenerational group of thirteen leading artists in the Asian American community whose contributions to culture are multiple, ranging from their distinctive visual arts production to their commitment to pedagogy to their dedication to research, activism, and community engagement. Featured artists include Patty Chang, Young Chung, Vishal Jugdeo, Simon Leung, Michelle Lopez, Yong Soon Min, Na Mira, Amanda Ross-Ho, Miljohn Ruperto, Dean Sameshima, Anna Sew Hoy, Amy Yao, and Bruce Yonemoto.

While Los Angeles has long been home to a large and growing Asian American population, the work of artists from diasporic immigrant communities remains underrepresented in art institutions in the city and in contemporary art discourse more broadly. In response, new organizations have formed in Los Angeles, such as GYOPO and the AAPI Arts Network, which aim to increase the visibility of diasporic artistic production at a time of heightened exclusion from the field. In doing so, they draw upon the inspiring model of historical activist artist collectives like Godzilla, an Asian American arts network founded in New York in 1990.

Contributing to these efforts of coalition building and collaboration, with a focused attention on artistic production in Los Angeles, Scratching at the Moon traces the overlapping activities among dynamic artistic communities that have come to define the city’s art world over the past two decades. The artists in the exhibition come from varied backgrounds some born in the United States and others who emigrated from Korea, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Canada and their works confront such topics as gender roles, structural racism, immigration, displacement, gentrification, family, and the archive. The exhibition presents significant works several created specifically for this presentation encompassing the mediums of video, multi-media installation, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and performance.

Scratching at the Moon argues that every body is an archive within which generations of experiences across continents are held. The stories contained within the works on view not only trouble, but also expand our understandings of Asian American identity beyond superficial characteristics. Instead, they present identity as something informed by experiences of displacement, cross-cultural existence, misidentification, and marginalization, alongside understandings of family bonds, chosen communities, and resiliency, resulting in a far more complex sense of identity as lived, shared, and embodied. Speaking to the beautiful entanglements that shape identity, Scratching at the Moon together with its accompanying catalogue honors and historicizes the important work of these deserving artists, mapping their roles and activities within a variety of cultural contexts in LA. Visible across the singular practices of these thirteen artists is a commitment to community, criticality, and resistance, and Scratching at the Moon provides an opportunity to bear witness, together, to the critical stories these important artists bring to light.