Into View: New Voices, New Stories

Into View: New Voices, New Stories features recently acquired paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, and mixed-media work by local and international contemporary artists who challenge and subvert convention by transforming familiar stories, stereotypes, and techniques. Works such as Heroine by Rupy C. Tut (b. India, 1985), a reimagined scene from a Punjabi folktale, and Nuwa’s Hands by Cathy Lu (b. United States, 1984), a contemporary envisioning of a Chinese mythological goddess, join past and present via a radical reclamation of traditional imagery. Throughout the exhibition, fresh approaches to well-established genres boldly defy expectations: what appears to be a traditional Chinese landscape painting by Wu Chi-Tsung (b. Taiwan, 1981) is in fact formed from sculptural layers of crumpled, photosensitive paper, while an experimental film by TT Takemoto (b. United States, 1967) peers beneath the surface of documentary footage of Japanese American women factory workers to reveal an intimate atmosphere of same-sex romance. “Prioritizing women-identifying and queer voices from the collection, this selection aims to change the model of male-dominated art history,” says Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & Programs Naz Cuguoglu. “By demanding a new agency from familiar narratives, these artists of color are writing their own futures.”

Incorporating references to cosmology, mythology, ecological concerns, and political uprisings, the included works share a mode of inventive storytelling which scholar and professor Donna Haraway has termed “speculative fabulation.” Broadly speaking, speculative fabulation describes a strategy of defamiliarizing and reimagining accepted stories, ideas, and modes of thinking to arrive at new and fantastic possibilities; it is often linked to the boundlessly imaginative world-building that informs technological inventions and science fiction. “The term speculative fabulation may be new to many viewers,” notes Cuguoglu, “but it reflects the need for new language to accompany the important conceptual innovations of contemporary artists from Asia and the Asian diaspora.”

This exhibition invites viewers to be active participants in storytelling and poetic narrative-making practices. The gallery includes a small library of books that inspired the exhibition concept, where reading group meetings will be held on select dates to offer a space for learning and dialogue. In January of 2024, the gallery hosted a special performance by conceptual artist and educator Duto Hardono; this event, in which participants create an improvised sonic composition as a meditation on repetition, language, and communication, is organized in collaboration with KADIST. In June of 2024, Small Press Traffic invited ten writers to converse with Into View through short pieces of speculative fabulation that play with the concepts of invented mythologies and imagined futures, in collaboration with Headlands Center for the Arts.

Artists: Koon Wai Bong, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Wu Chi-Tsung, Michael Jang & Barry McGee, Cathy Lu, Jiha Moon, Younhee Paik, Nicole Pun, Stephanie Syjuco, TT Takemoto, Wesley Tongson, Rupy C. Tut, and Jenifer K Wofford.

Press:

Into View in Gazette, 48hills, SF Chronicle, SF Chronicle, SF Chronicle, SF Examiner, NBC

READING GROUP

Curious about the ideas, themes, and stories behind the artworks of Into View: New Voices, New Stories? Join us for friendly conversations in Hambrecht Gallery, as the exhibition space is transformed into a participatory and inclusive venue for dialogue and exchange. Each monthly session focuses on selected readings and offers a chance to meet local artists and authors for an intimate discussion of art, our lives, and the changing world. Dive into issues of community and belonging, language and liberation, queer aesthetics, the politics of care, issues of representation, and the need for joy.  

February Reading Group: Introducing Speculative Fabulation

Hosted by Asian Art Museum curators Naz Cuguoglu and Padma Dorje Maitland, February’s reading group kicks off the series with an introductory discussion of Donna Haraway’s concept of “speculative fabulation,” a mode of inventive storytelling that serves as the common thread linking the diverse artworks of Into View: New Voices, New Stories. 

Readings (texts available online are linked below):

  • Donna J. Haraway, “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far,” Pilgrim Award Acceptance Comments, July 7, 2011

  • Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14

  • Naz Cuguoglu, Mine Kaplangi, and Haki Serhat Cacekli, “How to Start a Reading Group” from “Where Do We Go From Here? Reflections on the After Hope Reading Group,” Art, Hope, Action, Archive Books, 2024

March Reading Group: Surface Relations 

In March, we welcome educator and author Vivian Huang for an intriguing and empowering discussion of “inscrutability.” Though this concept has historically been used in racist rhetoric portraying Asians and Asian Americans as a mysterious “other,” Huang’s scholarship radically reframes inscrutability as “a dynamic anti-racist, feminist, and queer aesthetic.” This session unpacks the “inscrutable Asian” trope while also considering how queer Asian American artists strategically use inscrutability to resist assimilation, preserve agency, and define their own narratives.

Reading

  • Vivian L. Huang, “Introduction: Inscrutable Surfacing,” Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability. Duke University Press, 2022, 1–23.

April Reading Group: Carefully Tending Traditions — a Conversation with Rupy C. Tut and Jason Wyman

Who are your ancestors and what practices of theirs do you carry with you today?

In April, join Rupy C. Tut and Jason Wyman for a conversation on care, creative collaboration, and navigating tradition. Drawing on selected readings, works of art, and their own work and practices, the discussion will address how we might work collectively to build and imagine new worlds. As Arahmaiani writes in her “Manifesto of the Sceptics”: “Our art must not be separated from life and become mere decoration. Art must be able to encourage a new awareness of humanity and a new social consciousness.”

Readings

  • Rupy C. Tut, “Search and Rescue,” a personal essay about Rupy C. Tut’s first post-pandemic solo show at Jessica Silverman Gallery in April of 2022. 

  • Larry Mitchell and Ned Astra, The F*****s & Their Friends Between Revolutions, Astra (book pp. 47–53 / PDF pp. 56–61).  

  • Arahmaiani, “Manifesto of the Sceptics,” Yogyakarta, Indonesia, July, 2009.   

May Reading Group: (Dis)Comfort and Belonging  

Join Bay Area-based artist TT Takemoto, whose 2018 experimental film “On The Line” is featured in Into View: New Voices New Stories, for a conversation examining “queer exhaustion,” which characterizes the artist’s encounters with Orientalism and other dominant narratives in the museum and art world, as well as a consideration of artworks in the exhibition that re-envision traditional mythologies through a queer lens. This reading group session will be hosted by Asian Art Museum Project Manager Jenna Erwin. 

Readings: