In "Unsettled Visions" the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of Asian American visual art. Machida focuses on works produced during the watershed 1990s, when surging Asian immigration had significantly altered the demographic, cultural, and political contours of Asian America, and a renaissance in Asian American art and visual culture was well underway. Machida conducted extensive interviews with ten artists working during this transformative period: men and women of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese descent, most of whom migrated to the United States. In dialogue with the artists, Machida illuminates and contextualizes the origins and intent behind bodies of their work. "Unsettled Visions" is an engaging look at a vital art scene and a subtle account of the multiple, shifting meanings of 'Asian-ness' in Asian American art. Analyses of the work of individual artists are grouped around three of the major themes that Asian American artists engaged with during the 1990s: representations of the other; social memory and trauma; and migration, diaspora, and a sense of place.
Machida considers the work of the photographers Pipo Nguyen-duy and Hanh Thi Pham, the printmaker and sculptor Zarina Hashmi, and installations by the artists Tomie Arai, Ming Fay, and Yong Soon Min. She examines the work of Marlon Fuentes, whose films and photographs play with the stereotyping conventions of visual anthropology, and a series of prints in which Allan deSouza examines the centrality of Orientalism to American popular culture. Machida reflects on Kristine Aono's museum installations embodying the effects of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and on Y. David Chung's representations of urban spaces transformed by migration in works ranging from large-scale charcoal drawings and installations to a multimedia 'electronic rap opera'.
