If you think of the artists of South America and the Caribbean, the Chinese and the Japanese aren’t exactly the first to pop into mind. Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibitions at three museums explore their sense of mixed identities.
History makes a rich reference point for art that explores the melting pot of cultures, and Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibitions at three museums make that case in spades by focusing on unexpected cultural connections: Asians in the Caribbean and Latin America.
One exhibition, “Circles and Circuits,” comes in two parts that represent past and present. “History and Art of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora” is at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park and “Contemporary Chinese Caribbean Art” is at the Chinese American Museum in downtown L.A. Meanwhile, the Japanese American National Museum has organized “Transpacific Borderlands: The Art of Japanese Diaspora in Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São Paulo.”
Themes of identity, memory and interconnectedness course through the veins of artists like Katarina Wong, who has a presence in both “Circles and Circuits” shows. During the installation of her work “Fingerprint Project: Murmuration Unfolding” at the California African American Museum, she checked the alignment of hundreds of small elliptical discs, wax pieces cast from the fingerprints of friends and family and held to the wall by long metal pins. Two arcs of discs seemed to float, an effect enhanced by shadows cast by overhead lighting and another set of shadows that Wong painted in ink onto the background.
“The title refers to the patterns starlings make when they flock,” she said. “I was inspired by this Federico García Lorca poem, which ends, ‘and where my body floats between opposing equilibriums.’”
Wong is Cuban Chinese, based in New York. She studied art at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Buddhism at Harvard Divinity School. From the latter, she said, she learned about the interdependence of all things.
“Circles and Circuits” was put together by Steven Wong, former chief curator at the Chinese American Museum and now curator at the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park, and Alexandra Chang, director of global arts programs at New York University. Three years ago, Wong hit upon the idea for the show and approached the California African American Museum about a collaboration for the Getty’s PST LA/LA initiative.
