Featured artist and panelist for “Not Your Model Minority: Pandemic, Proximity, and Power” curated by Marjorie Lee at STAMP Gallery in Maryland.

Curator's Statement

Not Your Model Minority: Pandemic, Proximity, and Power is a response to the wave of anti-Asian rhetoric and violence surrounding the “Chinese virus” and the critical self-evaluation of Asian American positionality in the movement for Black Lives and earlier histories of Black and Asian solidarities.

In the mid-1900s, Asian Americans, as a group, were labeled as the racial “Model Minority” for their supposed achievement of a higher degree of socioeconomic success in comparison to other racial minority groups, most notably Black Americans. Yet, how can we challenge the idea of race--commonly understood as a socially-constructed notion of difference--as an instrument of empire? Where do Asian Americans fall in relation to other minority groups as a result of larger interrelated struggles of land, labor, and empire?

The five artists in this show engage and subvert assumptions affixed on the racialized and pathologized Asian body-- as perpetual foreigners, consumers in the system of whiteness, newly hypervisible yet historically invisible, submissive, quiet, apolitical, and displaced by United States imperialism and militarization--residing in the American landscape.

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