| Creative License: Walking through Asian American Cultural Productions narrates the development of Asian American art within a cultural moment, that of multiculturalism, and its function within particular exhibitionary spaces. The dissertation also addresses sustained inquiries of identity politics. Moreover it outlines the complexities of formulating a theoretical framework through which to talk about a trajectory of American art, race, and aesthetics due to commensurate paradigms with canonical notions of art history and formal stylistic elements.;I center Creative License's discussion of race, space, Asian American art, and subjectivity in and through the exhibitionary space. I focus on the process of framing and context, the different ways in which Asian American art is displayed, presented, and interpreted in the following exhibitions, The Whitney Biennial of 1993, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, As Time Goes By: History, Memory, and Sentimentality, and the mourning after. In this dissertation, I examine the exhibition as an actual physical space, a theoretical and conceptual framework, a discursive medium, and as a mediating analytical category.;The first half of the dissertation examines how the exhibitionary space serves at once as a panopticon, spectacle, and a representation of the public sphere through an organization of space and vision. Framed in the 1990s by a discourse of multiculturalism, the exhibitionary space serves as a site of projection that rehearses a liberal pluralism and contains a potentially intervening oppositional practice. The second half of Creative License introduces a pedagogical paradigm to read Asian American cultural productions through the everyday. I extend and rework Lisa Lowe's model of an aesthetics of infidelity, Freud's concept of mourning and melancholia and the International Situationists exercises of derive to account for Asian American art through a critical reading of works by Kim Yasuda and select artists in a exhibition entitled the mourning after (1999). |
