Leonard Suryajaya’s An Embarrassment (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
“This is the end of history,” proclaims a young woman holding a camera in Diane Severian Nguyen’s If Revolution is a Sickness, part of the Armory’s just-opened exhibit of Asian American artists.
By Garrett Rowlan
The exhibit entitled my hands are monsters who believe in magic (the phrase is from Ocean Vuong) features 10 artists whose vibrant and sometimes puzzling work doesn’t suggest the world’s end but certainly its complications.
The way, for example, that Nguyen’s 20-minute long film begins with Tarkovsky-like rural images then morphs into young people singing and dancing against a backdrop of urban decay. Is this revolution for the hell of it, as Abbie Hoffman once proclaimed, or partying into the apocalypse? Does the film’s final shot of a page of yellowed sheet music burning show defiance, a determination to break with history, despair, or what?
Perhaps history is that thing that watches us whether we like it or not, as suggested by the wall of Spellbound-like eyes that surround Leonard Suryajaya’s triad of family portraits; or, on the gallery’s opposite side, the way the eye-like illuminated discs of Amia Yokoyama’s Wyrm Theory are linked together like a tree whose leaves burst with images behind which a woman is continually running left to right.
Other works of art tease at meaning like Jarod Lew’s enigmatic photos of disconnection, or the large, object-cluttered photos of Guanyu Xu, reminding us of our own personal histories and the detritus of collected things; or Tommy Kha’s Den (tist Room) which suggests a trauma (or maybe it’s the sight of a dentist chair in the picture that gives me the willies) commensurate with the collage’s fragmented title.
The exhibit will run through August 3, giving those interested plenty of time to explore its complexities.
Cathy C. Lu’sPeach With Hair 2022 (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
Tommy Kha’s Den(tist)
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