An edition of Unnamable (2018)

Unnamable

The Ends of Asian American Art

Locate

My Reading Lists:

Create a new list


Buy this book

Last edited by MARC Bot
July 11, 2025 | History
An edition of Unnamable (2018)

Unnamable

The Ends of Asian American Art

Charting its historical conditions and the expansive contexts of its emergence, the author challenges the notion of Asian American art as a site of reconciliation for marginalized artists to enter into the canon. Pressing critically on how the politics of visibility and recognition reduces artworks by Asian American artists to narrow parameters of categorization, this work reconceives Asian American art not as a subset of objects, but as a discursive medium that sets up the conditions for a politics to occur. By approaching Asian American art in this way, the author refigures the way we see Asian American art as an oppositional practice, less in terms of its aspirations to be seen than in terms of how it models a different way of seeing and encountering the world. Uniquely presented, the chapters are organized thematically as mini-exhibitions, and offer readings of select works by contemporary artists including Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Simon Leung, Mary Lum, and Nikki S. Lee. Inspired above all by their art practice, the author argues for an alternative approach to exhibition making and methods of reading that conceives of these works not as "exemplary" instances of Asian American art, but as engaged in an aesthetic practice that remains open-ended, challenging the assumptions that racialize artists within an "Asian American" context. In this book, the author insists that in order to reassess Asian American art beyond its place in art history, she suggests the possible need to let go not only of established viewing and curatorial practices, but even the category of Asian American art itself.

Publish Date
Publisher
NYU Press
Language
English
Pages
272

Buy this book

Edition Availability
Cover of: Unnamable
Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art
Jun 05, 2018, NYU Press
paperback
Cover of: Unnamable
Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art
Jun 05, 2018, NYU Press
hardcover in English

Add another edition?

Book Details


Edition Notes

Source title: Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art

Classifications

Library of Congress
N6538.A83M56 2017, N6538.A83 M56 2018

The Physical Object

Format
hardcover
Number of pages
272

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL27346540M
ISBN 10
0814764290
ISBN 13
9780814764299
LCCN
2016047747
OCLC/WorldCat
961035053
Amazon ID (ASIN)
0814764290

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL20164468W

Community Reviews (0)

No community reviews have been submitted for this work.

Lists

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON