Forging American:
Art in the Workings of an
Asian American Rust Belt
September 8 – November 17, 2017
CEPA Gallery's Big Orbit Project Space
Buffalo, New York
Curated by Natalie Fleming
and Van Tran Nguyen
On June 19, 1982, Chinese-American Vincent Chin was struck over the head with a baseball bat while celebrating his bachelor party in a suburb of his hometown, Detroit. The two white men who beat Chin to death assumed that he was Japanese and therefore responsible for the loss of their jobs in the automobile industry. The white judge who oversaw the resulting court case sentenced the men to three years probation, reasoning: “These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”
These events reveal the limitations of the American imagination concerning both lives like Chin’s and cities like Detroit. As the term “Asian American” suggests, his distinct ethnic background is erased, while his physical features disallow for the recognition of his American birth. Likewise, the complexities of Detroit and other cities known for declining populations, failing factories, and aging infrastructure, are reductively labeled “Rust Belt,” due to our lack of imagination concerning American production. The rust that now defines these cities indicates that they will never truly recover, but instead, will continue to corrode with time. Looking for hope, Rust Belt officials have increasingly promoted Asian migration as a source of potential renewal. Such welcome, however, is often framed through economic incentive, with expectations that the new residents will live up to a stereotype of the model minority. Today, Asia is the leading source of U.S. immigration, but the resulting negotiations of space and identity remain all but invisible on a national level.
This exhibition revels in the complexities of American borders and belonging, asking viewers to reconsider their assumptions to imagine the past, present and future multiplicities of the Rust Belt and its residents.
Artists: Chris Lee, Dan S. Wang, Harumo Sato, Howard Hao Tran, Jing Xu, Kalpana Subramanian, Law Eh Soe, Lingfei Zhao, Mein Thein, Mizin Shin, Natalie Fleming, Pamela Ybañez, Robert Fleming, Sepideh Pourhang, Serena Hocharoen, Sophia Yung, Van Tran Nguyen
Additional support is generously provided by the University at Buffalo Department of Art, Department of Transnational Studies, the Humanities Institute City and Society, the Transnational Studies Graduate Student Association, and Hodgson Russ LLP.
