Danielle Wu
Published: 2019-06-21
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Catalogue for a group exhibition curated by Danielle Wu at Tiger Strikes Asteroid that brings together artists who engage with the strange and synthetic life of Asiatic "yellow" flesh: Charlotte Greene, Tenaya Izu, Candice Lin, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, Juana Valdes, and Elliott Jun Wright. Featured artists confront the fraught history of how Asiatic femininity in the Western imagination has been repeatedly evoked through the perfected, manufactured, and assembled material, from anime (Charlotte Greene, Tenaya Izu) and porcelain (Candice Lin, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, Juana Valdes) to K-beauty products (Elliott Jun Wright). Anne Anlin Cheng describes this violent and deeply psychological process as "Ornamentalism," or "the forging of the sense of personness through artificial and prosthetic extensions." As Asiatic flesh continues to provide an ornamental, technological shell for the crisis of Euro-American personhood, Cheng asks, "What is inside the machine? The yellow woman: the ghost within the ghost."