SpaceBi

Mini protest signs declaring “Every Artist is a Thief” or “Take Back Art” seem to protest the patina-tarnished ancient artifacts in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. They are a part of artist Imin Yeh’s current intervention, SpaceBi. Yeh purchased a high-level museum membership, called the Jade Circle, for $3,000; it offers donors a yearlong host of perks, including access to the Peterson Room, the museum’s exclusive members-only lounge. Subversively, Yeh has offered up her membership access for others to propose their own projects. She uses the room as a pseudo-studio, employing this sanctioned donor access for unsanctioned reasons. Occupy the Asian is one of the inaugural interventions in which Yeh and three other artists/activists made small protest signs in the Peterson Room that they displayed and photographed throughout the museum.

Yeh is a former museum store employee, so her position as an interloper is constantly in flux. Her past work investigates the intersections of race, identity, and politics through the spaces and practices of cultural consumerism and labor, specifically in terms of America’s consumption of Asian goods and culture. Yeh’s purchase of the membership situates her squarely within the tensions she typically explores from a critical distance. As a donor, Yeh implicates herself by financially supporting the institution as much as any other affluent consumer of Asian antiquities, history, and culture who would typically fall within her critique.

The Brundage collection is one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Asian artifacts, and the museum is beholden to the expectations of its endowment and institutional politics. In effect, the exhibitions have a tendency to position Asian art and culture from a particular Orientalist lens of Asia, which is in direct tension with the complex needs of the broad and diverse Asian diaspora. Yeh might be a donor, but she is also an unsanctioned Asian American contemporary artist. Her presence puts the diaspora of Asian artists on the frontlines of confronting Orientalist consumption and the fixed cultural narratives produced within these displays of institutionalized histories.

Jade Circle Members Lounge (exterior view), Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2011. Photo: Imin Yeh.

Yeh interrogates the institution but also the closed and fixed dialogue around the potentiality of what Asian art could be. With SpaceBi, Yeh affords herself and others the opportunity to exhibit and directly confront these issues within the institution itself. SpaceBi questions the creation and interrogation of the discourse around Asian art and by default the entangled cultures, histories, and diasporas of cultural spectatorship and consumption. Yeh takes engagement into her own hands, and offers us the same opportunity.

For more information, please visit www.spacebi.org.

Michele Carlson is a practicing artist, writer, and educator whose interdisciplinary research investigates the intersections of history and memory, loss, race, gender, transnational adoption, racial melancholia, and popular culture. She is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.