Abby Chen Head of Contemporary Art Department at the Asian Art Museum
What's Next for the Asian Art Museum
Head of Contemporary Fine art Abby Chen on the expansion and renovation—and the artworks that will re-introduce the museum to the public.
Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion, Rendering, 2020. © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
PHILLIPS: The Asian Art Museum will soon reopen to reveal an impressive expansion and renovation. What are you lot most excited to run across in the new infinite?
ABBY CHEN: I'g about excited to feel the new free energy of the space both inside and outside. I'm excited to see how our audiences create that energy as they flow through the new spaces. This idea of catamenia was one of the cardinal components of the transformation: a terrace, new lobbies, even new doors that open up into new galleries. The building is continued now in a way that we hope reinforces how we hope our audiences brand connections, likewise. These are connections between artworks, betwixt cultures, between fourth dimension periods. It's really a unique infinite that represents three singled-out architectural styles, too, and each style reflects the different ways Asian art has been collected and presented in the Westward. Soon after nosotros open, these spaces and artworks are going to outset working together for the showtime time. With our historic and contemporary collection and our new commissions, the transformation underscores how the museum is stretching, in both senses of the word: reaching for something new, but also flexing its strengths.
Abby Chen, Head of Gimmicky Art. © Asian Fine art Museum of San Francisco.
P: You work very closely with artists. Can you speak to 1 that is creating piece of work that you lot find to be particularly relevant for this moment?
Ac: On our Hyde Street Art Wall, at the pedestrian level of our new Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion, we accept a commissioned mural from Bay Area-based artist Jenifer G Wofford called Pattern Recognition. This artwork is colorful and full of popular energy, calling out in bubbling the names of important 20th century Asian American artists like Carlos Villa and Bernice Bing who have historically been omitted from major museum exhibitions and collections. It'south a really satisfying and vibrant testimonial nearly the power of visibility and representation. Jenifer spent a lot of time exploring our drove to develop it, cartoon on traditional motifs to create a kind of surreptitious code, a code that'southward embedded on the walls of the museum, and bringing the inside of the museum outside, making sometimes unknown, and often underrecognized artists visible again. It'south so relevant to this moment since it's about admission and engagement as much as bear upon. We need that energy and nosotros need that knowledge.
Jenifer K Wofford, Pattern Recognition(detail), 2020. © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
P: The museum will soon host an immersive digital installation with teamLab. Tin can you speak to the inspiration backside this collaboration, and tell us a bit more about the project?
Ac: Because of the pandemic teamLab has been postponed until summer of 2021. We really have other upcoming collaborations we're really excited nearly, especially those featured on our new Eastward West Depository financial institution Art Terrace. We accept sculptures from universal names like Ai Wei Wei, equally well as local and international artists similar Pinaree Sanpitak, Jas Charanjiva, and Ala Ebtekar, who create wonderful juxtapositions with each other. In that respect, the terrace is a chat starter and a breath of fresh air—assuming the fires are out when information technology opens!
If the terrace is not as usable because of fires, I feel this pushes us to remember hard about how else the museum can be relevant to our community—to artists and to audiences. It's kind of an alternate reality: you're inside hiding from the fires which means hiding from the natural world. With the pandemic, the museum already became a closed space, a filtered space, and the terrace is supposed to offer a relief valve of going exterior. Both are a kind of sanctuary. Merely right now, with the fume, both the outside and the within are closing in. Whether the terrace is open or not, the museum offers yous a chance to confront that alternating reality, to question what it means. The whole space becomes a mechanism for framing or reframing how nosotros think and experience what's happening.
Lam Tung Pang, A Mean solar day of Two Suns, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
P: In today's digital era, how practice you come across the digital forum addressing the greater needs of the museum and its engagement with the public?
Air conditioning: Traditionally museums tend to prioritize objects. The digital dimension gives yous the possibility of expanding museums past the thought of existence a depository facility. The pandemic demanded that we pivot to existence 100% virtual to keep up our date, and I think our digital initiatives ultimately showed what this museum stands for: breaking down barriers between art and audition, and inviting anybody to participate in critical conversations across the world. But what we're besides very excited nigh or really what we're discovering is that through technology the museum can keep the living feel alive, continuously.
People think digital however privileges the object, since it gives yous a mediated way of viewing it upwards shut, like with our Google Arts and Culture collaboration. But contemporary art operates outside that context, since then much of it doesn't rely on displaying something under drinking glass—be information technology a vitrine or your screen. AI, VR, gaming, these use digital to expand the experience, to connect you and others more closely with what the creative person is trying to express or question with their piece of work. In some means tech and coding are the "crafts" of the 21st century, so it's no surprise that nosotros're moving them into galleries for interrogation, study, and appreciation—they're already permeating our lives.
Jayashree Chakravarty, Personal Infinite, 2001. © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
P: Which exhibition or artist project are you about looking forward to tackling in this next year?
Air-conditioning: We finally take a gallery dedicated to showcasing the museum's gimmicky collection. Nosotros haven't had this earlier. The countdown exhibition in early on 2021 is chosen Memento and it'due south not only the debut of the repurposed gallery, but the debut of two artists in conversation together, and their debut together in an Asian art museum. We're the first North American museum to collect works from these artists, Personal Infinite from 2001 by Jayashree Chakravarty and A mean solar day of two Suns from 2019 past Lam Tung Pang.
P: Tin can you tell me more about those works?
Air conditioning: They're architectural‐scale, multimedia ruminations on memory and intent, and how these inform our experience of urban infinite. These works feel and so relevant right now, peculiarly because they're coming from what, in the art world, are kind of under‐the radar cities—Calcutta and Hong Kong. Memento recenters the chat nosotros're having about who occupies urban space and how the politics of this shapes who we (think) we are. This debut is paving the manner for an upcoming Carlos Villa retrospective in 2021 that nosotros hope is going to alter the conversation we're having in this land about modern and gimmicky art, who gets to exist an creative person and what kind of art they make, and refocuses it on still critical topics similar multicultural liberation, self‐structure, even the origin myths that sustain and inspire us. It highlights how versatile "contemporary" art is.
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Source: https://www.phillips.com/article/63270392/whats-next-for-the-asian-art-museum
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