Salzburg Global Fellow Dianne Shen explores visual storytelling in Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander communities
This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellow Dianne Shen, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse” in September 2024.
How do Asian Americans see themselves today? What images inform their experiences and identity-making? I am an archivist fascinated by visual materials that portray the making and remembering of Asian America. Since the late nineteenth century, Asian culture in the U.S. has largely been rendered, documented and interpreted through a white American lens made for white mainstream audiences.
The Origins of the Asian American Movement
From political cartoons of infantilized coolies in newspapers to Japonisme paintings, the production of racialized images engendered ideas about Asian people in America. It was not until the late 1960s that the Asian American Movement generated an explosion of new “Asian American” art, photography, film, experimental writing, and poetry created by and for Asian Americans, becoming emblematic of political resistance. From an art historical perspective, this period bookends an Asian American cultural renaissance centered around political and racial awakening.
Equipped with new vocabularies and anticolonial frameworks for collective liberation, diasporic Asian artists in America established a new canon of art informed by lived experience, bodily memory and personal testimony. Asian American art showed how aesthetics could be used to interrogate and intervene in power and politics.
Posters, murals, zines like "Gidra" (1969-1974), and graphics depicting motifs of liberated butterflies, tigers, and panthers as yin and yang, golden yellow fists and slogans like “Yellow Peril supports Black Power!” all became recognizable iconography for Asian American youth and activists of the time. Fascinatingly, these same visuals reappeared and inspired Asian American millennials and Gen Zers to make protest art and digital art for the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, and later again for Stop Anti-Asian Hate rallies.
By refashioning these same aesthetics into contemporary versions, designs from the past helped Asian Americans represent themselves in the present. Circulating art on social media platforms or at in-person marches also made space for Asian Americans to take liberatory ownership in how they want to be portrayed and remembered.
Asian American Activism in Hawaiʻi
More specific to U.S.-occupied Hawaiʻi where I live, I am curious how Asian Americans see themselves here and how Asian American activism is enacted and grappled with in Oceania under the “AANHPI” (Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander) labeling. Decades before the Asian American Movement, Asians in Hawaiʻi advocated for statehood in order to vote in national elections, elect their own governors, and demonstrate national loyalty in the post-World War II period. For this reason, the crowning of statehood in 1959 was seen and remembered as a long-awaited civil rights victory rather than a veiled form of settler colonialism that expanded the U.S. empire in the Pacific and displaced Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians) from their ancestral homeland.
Photographs of Asian labor on sugarcane plantations in the 1850s, for example, often serve as “visual evidence” of an Asian immigrant success narrative. Similarly, the development of fusion cuisines and blended traditions contribute to a flawed logic that normalizes Asian Americans as “belonging to” Hawaiʻi. From this framing, images of Asian American inclusion in California, for example, misrepresents and distorts Asian settler colonial realities in Hawaiʻi. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Hawaiʻi is the only state with an Asian American majority where nearly 57% residents identify as Asian. It also revealed that 53% of Kānaka ʻŌiwi live on the continent due to the unaffordable cost-of-living and loss of land to excessive development by the economic elite; these circumstances are historically traced to perpetual colonial oppression since the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893.
Images as a Mode of Truth-Telling
My current project examines how Asian American millennial and Gen Z artists in Hawaiʻi are engaging with mid-twentieth century photographs of Asian merchants and Asian-owned stores, markets, and businesses in their artistic practice. A shared commonality among young artists is how they situate the Asian-owned store as a nostalgic site that functions as proof of their American origins. It is also, I argue, how Asian Americans participate in settler colonial projects within the U.S. capitalist system that continues to impoverish Kānaka Maoli.
This duality is illustrated by comparing photographer Kapulani Landgrafʻs portrait of Haunani-Kay Trask with a superimposed text reading, “We are not American. He Hawaiʻi Au Mau Au Mau,” with Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1942 photograph of Wanto & Co. grocery store in Oakland, California titled, “I am an American.” Side-by-side, the photographs demonstrate literal and visual contradictions in how Asian Americans claim American belonging, while Native Hawaiians reject it. The tensions emanating from the two images capture palpable frictions in the telling and documenting of Asian American and Kānaka ʻŌiwi histories, adding to the contentious AANHPI naming and grouping.
As scholars, community organizers, artists, writers, and policymakers invested in the health of AANHPI communities, this tension is something we must reckon with in order to move toward the goal of collective liberation and cross-racial solidarities, just as the Asian American Movement hoped to achieve. As global society increasingly relies on pictures and videos, images become the central mode of evidence and truth-telling in the digital age. I remain curious to see how Asian Americans express themselves through artistic endeavors in the near future, as they actively create and influence what will be remembered tomorrow.
Dianne Shen is an archivist/curator based in Honolulu, Oahu. She has worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, The Broad Museum, Los Altos History Museum and the East-West Center Gallery. She is currently pursuing her PhD in American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research looks at Asian American visual and material culture, vernacular/family photography, aesthetics and ethnoarchitecture from the early twentieth century to the contemporary period. Her projects are centered around civic engagement, community archival praxis, and anticolonial/decolonial approaches to cultural recovery and stewardship.
This article was featured in our digital publication, which includes more coverage from the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse”.
