The Collective Ethos at Heart of Asian-American Activism

LOS ANGELES — In May 2021, amid the half-lockdown between the alpha and delta variants of COVID-19, “Racist, Sexist Boy”The song went viral. The song was recorded in a library by The Linda Lindas (all-female punk band from BIPOC), and it went viral. “You say mean stuff,” they growl, “You close your mind to things you don’t like. You turn away from what you don’t wanna see.”

Part of what made it striking, of course, was seeing four young women of Asian and Latina descent — the oldest is 18, the youngest 12 — busting out a punk hit in a library in the midst of the pandemic. It arrived just a month after the Atlanta shootings, which left eight Asian American women deadIt sparked a national conversation on anti-Asian hatred.

Martin Wong, father of Eloise Wong (The Linda Lindas bassist), was 25 years ago on an Asian American punk trip of his own. Wong is also co-founder of Giant RobotEric Nakamura also co-authored, the punk-infused magazine-turned-zine about Asian American culture. In 1995, they penned the influential article “Return to Manzanar,” wherein they identify the best places for skateboarding at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, one of many internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.

At the site of a plaque recounting Manzanar’s history, they find offerings such as “candy, stuffed animals, Budweiser, Martinelli’s Apple Juice, make-up, homework, a comb,” and other sundry items. “We added a pack of ramen seasoning,” they write, “and skated in.” 

The skateboard Wong used to get around Manzanar is on display at Oxy Arts, the public art centre of Occidental College. The skateboard, copied of Giant Robot, along with cardboard cutouts of the video’s music, are just a few of the works in Voice a Wild Dream: Moments in Asian America Art and Activism, 1968-2022curated and edited by Kris Kuramitsu (Occidental Professor of Practice). 

If there’s a lesson in the story of the Wong family, it’s that activism can extend across generations, building over time and adapting to new contexts. Wong, the elder, relied on zines for publicity. Wong, the younger, could be viral on YouTube. 

The show focuses on artist collectives in Los Angeles, New York, and draws connections between the Asian American collectives who founded magazines such as Gidra(1967-74) Bridge (1971-85) and projects like the Auntie Sewing Squad (lovingly made into the acronym ASS), which started out by making PPE in the early days of the pandemic, and the Chinatown Art Brigade, initiated in 2015 to resist gentrification in New York City’s Chinatown. 

GidraThe bold covers of, which hang from the ceiling at gallery entrance, document West Coast Asian American experiences during the turbulent days that followed the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements. The magazine was named after a three-headed dragon in Japanese monster movies. It covered politics, society, poetry, and culture. BridgeOn the other side, he documented the East Coast scene. He was also published. Yellow PearlA collection of prints inspired from the album A Grain Of Sand: Music for the Struggle American Asians.

Where Make a wild dream a realityThe beauty of capturing and showcasing how the current moment in Asian American activism is rooted is decades of work by mediamakers, artist collectives and musicians trying to document and express Asian American experiences under oppressive structures is what succeeds. Indeed, one electronic work, titled “Asian American Art Activism Relationship Map, 2022,” by Yvonne Fang and Alexandra Chang, aspires to map these webs of relationships across time and space through a websiteExhibition. It is now possible to see clusters of people around key hubs like the Asian American Art Network and Asian Arts Initiative. The focus on collectives is essential, as it dismantles the idea that activism is driven by individual charismatic figures — in reality, social change is possible because many hands come together, whether to make a punk magazine or a face mask or a viral video.

Where I wish the show did more was in expanding our understanding of the history of the term “Asian American.” Coined by UC Berkeley student activists Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka in 1968, it is being re-explored and re-evaluated in today’s context, even in relation to Americans with South, Southeast and Central Asian heritage. The exhibition takes its title from traci kato-kiriyama’s poem “Letters to Taz – on meeting (After Taz Ahmed’s ‘If Our Grandparents Could Meet’),” in which the poets imagine a meeting between their respective grandparents. Ahmed and kato-kiriyama, both artist-poet-activists based in Los Angeles, have been exchanging poems for yearsand have been involved in activist work to connect Japanese American experiences of the 1940s and Muslim American experiences in America after 9/11. 

This collaboration, and the two poets’ powerful exchanges, would have made a worthy section in the exhibition, as they point to larger themes connecting the history of Asian American identity, colonialism in Asia, Islamophobia, and the role of poetry in helping us explore difficult histories. Ahmed’s original poem conveys the possibilities of future exhibitions of Asian American art and activism, as she draws lines between her grandfather’s experience in Lahore and kato-kiriyama’s grandfather’s experience in California:

Perhaps my grandfather's camp out of Lahore?
Had taken notes from Manzanar's camps
How to make enemies out of innocent citizens
Perhaps war is tripped upon a universal language
Both stifling independence and oppressive independence are shot with the same brand bullets.

All of this being said. Make a wild dream a reality This is a dream of a show, presenting the very real media that have defined Asian American identity while also highlighting the importance collective action for social change. As one elder says in a documentary about Chinatown Art Brigade’s work, “A single flower doesn’t make it Spring. Only when all of the flowers bloom is it Spring.”

Voice a Wild Dream: Moments in Asian American Art and Activism, 1968-2022 Continues at Oxy Arts, 4757 York Blvd. Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, through November 18. Kris Kuramitsu curated the exhibition.

On November 17, former Hyperallergic contributor Ryan Lee Wong will be in intergenerational dialogue with poet Christopher Soto and Wong’s mother, activist and community organizer Jai Lee Wong, organized by GYOPOStop DiscriminAsian.

Disclosure: Asian American arts activism is a small world, and it’s inevitable that groups overlap. Yao Collaborative works with some of those organizations and I am on its board.