Reframing Abstraction in Asian American Art: Race, Identity, and Politics Beyond Representation, 1960–1982

Author

Chaeeun Lee, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Art History

Advisor

Mona Hadler

Committee Members

Katherine Manthorne

Wen-shing Chou

Caitlin Meehye Beach

Subject Categories

American Art and Architecture | Asian American Studies | Asian Art and Architecture | Contemporary Art | History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | Modern Art and Architecture | Queer Studies

Keywords

Asian American art, abstraction, art and politics, race, gender, and sexuality, San Francisco, New York

Abstract

This dissertation explores Asian American artists’ engagement with abstraction as a visual and conceptual method during the dynamic period of Asian American activism and broader social justice movements. The works examined here fall into neither the framework of the so-called Oriental abstraction of the 1950s, which reconfigured abstraction through arguably self-orientalizing notions of “Asianness,” nor the identity-based, representational aesthetics of multicultural art in the late 1980s and 1990s. Instead, these artists leverage abstraction’s embrace of visual opacity, interpretive openness, and deferred legibility to intertwine concerns around form, aesthetics, identity, and politics. Focusing on four case studies from San Francisco and New York—Bernice Bing, Carlos Villa, Kazuko Miyamoto, and the artist-poet duo Arakawa and Madeline Gins—I examine how each artist’s formal experimentation reflects not only active engagement with contemporaneous movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Funk art, (Post-)Minimalism, Conceptualism, and psychedelic art, but also their specific conditions of racialization and migration, and their visions of freedom and futurity that exceed canonical art historical frameworks.

This study advances two interrelated arguments. First, it contends that these artists’ abstract practices resist the Orientalist frameworks that have historically shaped perceptions of Asian American abstraction. Second, it argues that their practices embody a minoritarian politics that, rather than seeking identity-based recognition, aims to unsettle and complicate normative systems of representation. While many of these artists were deeply aligned with Asian American, Third World, and feminist movements, their work shifts focus away from consolidating identity toward critically reimagining the structures of power, value, and perception through which identities and justice might be envisioned.

Recommended Citation

Lee, Chaeeun, "Reframing Abstraction in Asian American Art: Race, Identity, and Politics Beyond Representation, 1960–1982" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6295