Asian American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery

It is easy to be blissfully ignorant believing that everyone and everything around you can be put into neat little boxes; Black, White, Asian, Latino, Gay and Straight. But people don't work that way. Things don't work that way. We all have a story to tell that is ours and ours alone. It has been quite some time since I have been pulled in quite like I was pulled in last week. Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits now view at the National Portrait Gallery touched me.

Gazing down the corridor to see CYJO's individual photographic portraits of Korean Americans I was reminded of Mexican casta paintings used by Spanish colonizers to justify treating mixed race people and their children either as worthy or unworthy of respect based on their particular hybrid.

Casta paintings created and simultaneously reinforced notions of racial superiority, systematically denying them their humanity on the basis of particular 'genetic cocktails'. So in effect, by presenting numerous Korean Americans one by one along with their own individual stories as they relate to their journey toward self-discovery and self-actualization, CYJO allows her audience to see Korean Americans as they are, not as one monolithic people with one face, but rather like all other ethnic groups, deserving of being seen as individuals who are part of a greater community. A community of individuals who are keepers of their own stories and experiences.

Daniel Dae Kim

Maggie Kim

I will include the wall text that accompanied Maggie Kim's portrait that I found so touching.
"My Korean American experience: Eat Kimchi. Take shoes off at an American classmate’s house and get funny looks. Be a faux-punk high school rebel. Learn to pine after blue-eyed, white boys. Aspire to be Madonna. Not allowed to just “hang out” at the mall. Be the smartest kid in school. Never have a boyfriend. Go to an Ivy League university. . . . The Big Apple calls. Yellow fever does exist! Learn Korean again and for real. . . . Forgive parents for everything they didn’t know about being American. Thank parents for everything they knew about being Korean."

As an African American woman with natural hair from the South, without any children or husband who is in pursuit of graduate studies I have been seen in a lens I don't care for: as an anomaly. When in fact, all of the other young women I surround myself with share my common experience. My friends and I all grew up hearing how "different" we were from the rest of "them." Although I resented it at first and wanted to fit in I came to appreciate that I never became one of "them." Whoever "they" were. So in that sense, I feel a since of kinship with other artists such as CYJO and  Roger Shimomura who create portraits and self portraits to deconstruct stereotypes and speak from a voice and place of  authentic experience.

Shimomura Crossing the Delaware

I was thrilled to surrender my subconscious misconceptions and assumptions at the door in favor of a more progressive view of our roles as individuals to not necessarily always represent our entire RACE, but instead be more comfortable in our own skin, speaking and acting for ourselves. There is no monolithic narrative that informs the Asian and Pacific American experience in these United States any more than there is one for the 'quintessential American' or the Everyday Black voice or movement or sense of expression. But the narrative that ran through all of Asian American Portraiture Now was poignant and informative.