Published 24th May 2022 CNN

Credit: Courtesy of Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Jeffrey Deitch, New York

Tired of being ‘fetishized and invisible,’ Asian artists are changing the narrative

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Written byAnn Binlot, CNN

In much of Western art, Asian women have often appeared as one-dimensional characters — sometimes seen as meek and docile, and at other times hypersexualized and exoticized. But such portrayals fail to show individuals coming from a myriad of cultural backgrounds, their identities rooted in distinctly different countries and histories.

“Wonder Women,” a new exhibition at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in New York, seeks to counter stereotypical representations made by outsiders, presenting works by Asian American and diasporic women and non-binary artists “portraying themselves or their family members as heroes in their own ways,” explained show curator Kathy Huang.

“I had always grappled with ideas of being both fetishized and invisible in pop culture and visual culture,” said Huang, adding that she drew inspiration from the 1981 poem “Wonder Woman” by Genny Lim.

“In the poem, the narrator is observing the different lives of Asian women,” she explained. “That’s something that I had wondered myself … because I have my individual experience as a Chinese American woman, but there were so many other experiences that I don’t know about.”

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