Last semester, an art professor described a print of mine as “East meets West,” and the words followed me for days afterward. People couldn’t think like that after all this time – certainly, globalization must have progressed enough to wreck the idea of neat and separate cultural spheres. Yet, as my experience showed, I was expecting too much.
I wasn’t making art for the purpose of addressing my Americanness or Indianness. My choices were informed by my cultural background, but my art had more merit to it than that face-value description. My work had a distinct point of view beyond my ethnic identification. I wasn’t interested in the East and West. I was interested in portrayals of illness, femininity, technology and disorder. Sometimes, I explored these subjects within the context of the South Asian diaspora and, other times, I didn’t.
Yet, as much as I resisted the East-West dichotomy, it popped up repeatedly in discussions of Asian-American art. Most recently, I was browsing an online library and stumbled upon a new release from Balli Kaur Jaswal, “Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows”. The synopsis described it as a “lively, sexy, and thought-provoking East-meets-West story about community, friendship, and women’s lives at all ages…” I groaned out loud. The review almost covered an Asian American story without mentioning hemispheres.
More issues abound when we consider what constitutes the East versus the West. In an Asian Studies course I took last year, the professor challenged the class to define the terms. Some classmates focused in on geography. Everything east of Turkey was the West, while the continent of Asia constituted the East. But what about Russia? Others decided that the West and the East aligned, respectively, with colonizing and colonized countries. But what about Japan?
We couldn’t come to a consensus. As Naoki Sakai, a professor emeritus of Asian Studies at Cornell University, sees it, that may have more to do with the flimsiness of “the West” as a concept than our ineptitude. He observes that the idea reinforces a Eurocentrist position on modernity that reveres societies with industrialized economies, secular institutions, democratic governments and robust middle classes.
Even the nations that this concept supposedly reflects best do not behave as predictably as the term asserts. For example, understanding the United States as a secular state obscures the role of Christian nationalism in the American political arena. As Sakai concludes, “Today the West as an analytic concept is bankrupt and generally useless in guiding our observation about certain social formations and people’s behavior in many loci in the world.” If the West is a poor descriptor of culture, the East — since it always exists in relation to the West — must be as well.
This dichotomy lacks utility when analyzing Asian-American art in particular because Eastern and Western motifs are not neatly distinguishable. Take, for example, a print I made of a woman in a sari on a moped. My art professor might say the woman in a sari is Eastern and the moped is Western. These distinctions depend on a theory of origination. The woman in the sari is thought to have originated from the East and the moped from the West.
This origination theory obscures the complexities of cross-regional exchange. Although its first commercial design was created in Britain, mopeds have a specific South Asian context, as they are a more common mode of transportation than cars, especially for lower-income families. As the uses and contexts of this invention evolves, so might its cultural ownership. More importantly, how useful is thinking about origination when analyzing this artwork? Does this framework reveal anything new? Does it achieve anything beyond reinforcing stereotypes about the East and West? The East contains all Asian tradition, while the West claims all innovation, even if the people and objects in these imagined spaces start new histories somewhere else.
Asian Americans are often imagined as people split between two worlds, the East and West. But that idea essentializes our identities without providing for the differences in how we see ourselves. We can think of ourselves as part Asian and part American, attest that we are only one or the other, feel most connected to an ethnic label outside of either, identify most with where we physically live, find little reason to examine our ethnic identity, change our minds about these labels over our lifetimes and more. While some may prescribe a “right” way for Asian Americans to understand our ethnicities, all these possibilities indeed remain.
Unless we invite it ourselves, Asian Americans should not be imagined in terms of hemispheres. Neither should our art. Putting our diverse creations under the “East meets West” umbrella dismisses the other concepts we engage and the arguments we make. The label also assumes that we all share a primary motivation — to join and make two distinct cultures compatible. Since Asian Americans can conceptualize our identities in such different ways, it’s reductive to make assumptions about how we incorporate our identities into our work.
I’d like to imagine a future where Asian American art is seen in its wholeness, rather than as the sum of its parts. I could find recognition as an artist interested in the portraiture of my people in their many forms, rather than someone cherry-picking cultural motifs. This difference is subtle but meaningful. They afford us individuality and acknowledge how our connection to an ethnic group might influence our work.
So the next time you interpret Asian American art, look beyond what appears Eastern or Western. That framework grows increasingly outdated as cultural identities reflect, resist and embrace globalization. When you fall back on the East and West dichotomy, you expose an ignorance to the multiplicities of Asian American identities.
MiC Columnist Roshni Veeramachaneni can be reached at rove@umich.edu.
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