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The term “medium” is often used to refer to an artist’s materials. But the 33 contemporary Asian American and Asian diasporic artists participating in “Spirit House,” an exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center from the museum’s Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI), might also be considered mediums themselves, in the context of the show’s themes.
AAAI co-director and curator Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander said the idea for the exhibition took shape as she embarked on dozens of studio visits and noticed that certain themes – including inheritance, migration, family narrative and the afterlife – kept emerging.
“I was thinking about these different themes in a framework to try and interpret them,” she told this news organization on a visit to the museum. “I wanted it to say something about the moment we’re in and the things that these artists are interested in.”
She looked to her own personal experience, including her childhood in Bangkok, for inspiration. She found herself pondering Thai spirit houses – small devotional structures that provide shelter for supernatural or spiritual beings.
“I was always fascinated with them because they’re these things you interact with that allow you to, essentially, talk to a different dimension, or speak to ghosts, or provide offerings for beings that you cannot see but who are around you, who protect you,” she said. “So for me the spirit house became symbolic of all of these larger themes in the way that a work of art can kind of function as a spirit house.”
The exhibition is organized into five sections: “Spirit House,” “Ghosts,” “Hauntings,” “Shrines” and “Dimensions,” with the artists representing a diverse range of backgrounds and artistic media.
The “Spirit House” section “is really about our relationship to architecture and the different spaces we inhabit throughout our lives, and how those are meaningful to us and can be transformative to us even though they’re these inanimate spaces,” Alexander said. “You have different references to architectural details such as doorknobs, doors or walls here, and I think each of these artists (is) working through their own relationships with these spaces that they’re often very separated from but have memory of.”
This section “reflects on the way that, as we as individuals leave traces on places that we’ve been, these places we’ve inhabited have gotten to also leave traces on us,” AAAI curatorial assistant Kathryn Cua added.
Brooklyn and Thailand-based Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Shore of Security, created from a burned and reconstructed wooden dollhouse originally made by Arunanondchai’s mother, is the closest thing to a traditional Thai spirit house in the exhibition, Alexander said. The piece “suggests that physically and psychologically breaking down one’s inherited traditions helps one understand origin myths, whether they are on an individual or a national scale,” the accompanying gallery text states.
Namita Paul’s family was forced to move from Pakistan to India after Partition (the 1947 division of British-ruled India into the nations of Pakistan and India). Her piece Testimony reimagines the facade of her grandparents’ house, resplendent in gold leaf, textiles and textures, including wheat berries and lentils and, according to Cua, represents her recollections of spending time at the family home.
“Even though it’s reflecting on this really tragic history, she has really fond associations of being in that place,” Cua said. “She’s talked about this as being an index in some ways of her family history.”
The section titled “Ghosts” includes Kelly Akashi’s poignant pieces Inheritance and Life Forms (Poston Pines). Akashi’s father and his family were incarcerated in an internment camp in Poston, Arizona, during World War II, a part of her family history that was only ever spoken of reluctantly. Wanting to know more, Akashi traveled to Poston herself to learn from the physical, natural material left there. In Life Forms, Akashi’s hand is cast in lost-wax bronze and holds a Poston pinecone. “According to her research, the pines that grow in Poston were actually planted by the Japanese Americans who were living in those camps, so she’s thinking about these natural materials as having borne witness to the atrocities that were committed against Japanese Americans,” Cua said. In Inheritance, the hand rests on a stone found in Poston, wearing a ring and bracelet passed down by Akashi’s grandmother. “She’s looking at the way this painful part of her family’s history is something that she inherits, much in the way that you would inherit family heirlooms.”
The “Hauntings” section is “really about the way that historical events aren’t isolated but they have ramifications in multiple timelines and multiple generations,” Alexander said. Tidawhitney Lek grew up in Long Beach, California, which has the largest Cambodian diaspora population in the United States. Lek’s painting “Refuge” was inspired by her father’s autobiography about his experience escaping the Khmer Rouge. In “Refuge,” Lek’s sister and young nieces look into a mirrored closet door, reflecting a wartime scene. Though they are living in a different time and place; the past, it seems, still haunts the family. The painting also draws a visual parallel between the palm trees of Cambodia and those of Long Beach, includes a sewing machine to represent the jobs undertaken by some of the female members of Lek’s family upon their move to the U.S., and shows a green manicured hand wrapping around the edge of the closet .
“I think it’s in reference to, just, that thinking about the ways these experiences of your family can haunt you in the present and enter the domestic space,” Alexander said.
There are photos from artist An-My Lê, taken in the 1990s, when she returned to Vietnam for the first time since her family left in the 1970s. “Here she is arriving at her ancestral land, trying to get to know it through a visual language that wasn’t about wartime photography,” Alexander said. Nearby, photos by Hmong American artist Pao Houa Her include “untitled (poppy field in Minnesota),” an image of an American backyard, with blooming poppies planted by the artist’s grandmother. Poppies, Alexander said, have a particular symbolism in and complicated history with Hmong communities, in regards to cultivation for opium as a means of livelihood. Just as Her and her family have been transplanted in the U.S. after leaving Laos as refugees, Alexander said, so have the flowers.
The section called “Shrines” is “about these kinds of ritual spaces that are common to us, growing up in the Asian diaspora,” Alexander said. The connections between food (especially fruit), memory, ancestors and culture looms large in this section, such as in Taiwanese American ceramic artist Stephanie H. Shih’s sculpture Offering (Ash Tower), which is based on the columbarium that houses her grandfather’s ashes, and takes the shape of a pagoda, featuring stacked platters holding lian wu (wax apples), pomelos, apples and bananas.
The “Dimensions” section explores “the way artists and works of art have the ability to transcend time and space,” Alexander said. “I think that all of us have felt the limitations of living only in the present moment. How can we challenge that? How can we go beyond that?” Art, she said, can be a powerful means of pushing those boundaries.
This section includes “Leymusoom Spirit House” by Heesoo Kwon, a multimedia, multi-piece installation. Kwon, who is originally from South Korea, is a shaman who’s created her own autobiographical, feminist religion called Leymusoom (the name stems from the Korean word for “agender”), which also represents a digital feminist utopia. Kwon has inserted her digital avatars, including the eponymous snake goddess Leymusoom, into her own archival family photos and videos, symbolically revising history, disrupting the restrictions of patriarchy.
“When she was first going through this footage, these images, she was noticing this very subservient position the women in her family were put in,” Cua said. “She had expressed that she wanted to go into these images and ‘mess everything up,’ so that’s what she does with her avatars.”
Leymusoom is also a response to Kwon’s strict Catholic upbringing, Cua added, and the messages she received growing up about not questioning religious, cultural and social norms.
“Thinking about the creation myth of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, the snake is who tempts Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. In Korean shamanism, snakes are often a reference to women, to the divine feminine, and they’re symbols of power. Looking at that contrast is something that Heesoo is really interested in,” Cua said. Kwon uses technology as a shamanistic tool, to blur timelines and realities. In one lenticular lightbox image, the avatars appear in a photo of Kwon and her younger sister as children, acting as sort of spiritual guardians, only appearing when the viewer looks at the image from certain angles.
“She’s thinking about how this has always been a present force in her life since she was a young child and that she was always destined to create this religion, this utopia,” Cua said.
Near one of the exhibition’s entrances is an interactive installation by Bay Area artist Christine Wong Yap, with fabric banners and calligraphy in multiple languages (Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Tagalog, Spanish and English) offering visitors a place to rest and reflect. The space was commissioned after a listening day was held with various community groups and it became clear that, due to some of the weighty themes of the exhibition, a quiet place for decompression and release was needed. An altar and offering cards allow visitors to leave notes, “whether it’s to someone who’s since passed, or a wish for the future, anything that you like,” Alexander said.
“Spirit House’s” extensive catalog is the first publication from the AAAI. The exhibition is the largest of a suite of current AAAI shows, including “TT Takemoto: Remembering in the Absence of Memory” and “Livien Yin: Thirsty.” These exhibitions are a reflection of the AAAI’s investment in working with and supporting living artists, Alexander said.
And while “Spirit House” represents the specific perspectives of the artists involved, it is also a reminder of the power of art to serve as a guide through spiritual encounters and difficult conversations.
“The show is obviously deeply rooted in our experiences of belonging to an Asian diaspora – our very varied and diverse experiences – but ultimately a lot of the topics of the show are meant to be somewhat universal, even though I have hesitations about ever using that word,” Alexander said. “It’s really about thinking through what it means to live a meaningful life on Earth and how art can help facilitate these types of transformative experiences that allow you to reckon with the past and present, and also the future.”
“Spirit House” is on view through Jan. 26 at the Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Drive, Stanford; open Wednesday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and weekends 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; free; museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/spirit-house.
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