How to Treat Your Immigrant Artist

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At a dinner party that I moved from Singapore to New York for—with guests by turns intensely and merrily passionate about books and the arts—my hostess, an art historian and curator, spoke about a Black immigrant artist who was receiving a great deal of attention right then and the difficulty of getting in touch with her because of the phalanx of gallerists and publicists monitoring everything that she said and did. It's a danger of being an immigrant artist, I replied in a non sequitur, the temptation to produce work that would please, even flatter, your host country.  Oh, my hostess said, I don't hold it against the artist. It's so hard out there, you do everything you can to survive and thrive. 

Her words came back to me yesterday while I was viewing the show "Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands" at the National Portrait Gallery in DC. The show is billed as the first solo exhibition by an Asian American at the gallery. Having just published a critical review of Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong's new poetry collection Time Is a Mother, I was ready to view the Chinese American artist's work with some skepticism. Why has Hung Liu been picked out of the hundreds of Asian American artists? What and whose narrative does she serve? What social connections have enabled and promoted the show?

If I am overly critical, it is because every immigrant artist in America is, for me, a mirror and a measure. It is impossible for me to view their work without a host of mixed emotions. The way I try to sort out such emotions is to write. Here is a draft of the poem.

At the National Portrait Gallery in DC,
the first solo show granted to an Asian
American artist, not born here, but fled
from Communist China to California.
 
The alien paintings are approachable—
a botanist grandfather with big hands
culled from the Cultural Revolution,
women refugees with babies and baskets,
 
a Mexican child and a Black boy, painted
after photographs by Dorothy Lange,
bright streaks of paint transforming pain to hope.
 
I’m a hard man. Be gentler. All exiles
have to fight for their place in the sun,
settle for sucking, no fucking around.

Jee Leong Koh
April 14, 2022

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