Skye Sumire Taniai:
Good Good Asian
August 15 - September 3, 2024
Location: LOT-EK Architecture & Design (616 East 9th Street, NEW YORK, NY 10009)
Opening Reception: August 15 (Thursday) from 6 to 8:30 PM
Self Portrait After the Quake
27 x 46.5 inches
Office Space in collaboration with LOT-EK Architecture & Design announces the solo exhibition of Skye Sumire Taniai, titled, "Good Good Asian." The exhibition will feature 10 ~ 15 works by Taniai exploring the racial injustices and politically hostile climate against Asians and Asian Americans in the US, from a uniquely Japanese American perspective.
As much as we would like to wish that the Asian stereotypes and racism against Asians would be a thing of the past, these forces of inequality persist in the US. For example, the former US President Donald Trump labelled the coronavirus as "Chinese," prompting a huge spike in hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans. It is with a defiant heart that Taniai makes her collages and paintings made from acrylic paint, flashe, water soluble ink, graphite, and photographic inkjet printouts.
Topics tackled by Taniai's works include immigration, assimilation, identity and transnationalism. For Taniai, references to historical events are important to fight the marginalization of the Asian American narratives in education. Although born in Iwakuni City in Japan, where the US Marine base is located, Taniai moved to the midwestern US in grade school and has been living there for more than two decades.
Japan is a well-known case as the first Asian country to westernize and to defeat a western
power in a war (i.e., Russo-Japanese war). The self-inflicted psychological scars left by the
modernization efforts can be seen even today, with Japanese anime depicting Japanese and
Northeast Asians with white-inspired features, such as pointy nose, colored eyes, and blonde
hair (i.e., Sailor Moon).
Within the context of this impossible, racialized standard of beauty, Taniai criticizes the bind that Asian Americans find themselves in, as they are hit with both Asian stereotypes online (and in the real world) and whitewashed depictions as found in Japanese anime. Taniai utilizes sarcasm, exaggeration, and irony in her collage and mixed media works to highlight the falseness of the racist narratives. The artists working in the similar tradition as Taniai include the contemporary artists such as Cindy Mochizuki and Hellen
Katanaka.
On a final note, Taniai's work is a product of the internet culture, which has dissolved traditional cultural and racial boundaries, allowing for appropriation and hybridity. There is no more source of originality in this era of globalization. It only makes sense for the artist to collage and paste onto her works the various images that she finds on the internet, to further reflect upon the never-ending and cyclically evolving cross-referencing that manifests in the social media and the digital world. Many of Taniai's works can be categorized as internet art because they are conceived as digital collage and also available as non-fungible tokens (NFT).
Artwork Checklist:
Gallery Installation:
