The Appearance: Asian Diasporas in Latin America & the Caribbean

The Appearance: Asian Diasporas in Latin America & the Caribbean will be the first exhibition of its kind in New York City to center the artistic production of the Asian Diasporas in the region from the 1940s to the present. Focusing on post-war and contemporary art, it brings together twenty-six artists from thirteen countries, working with a range of artistic mediums, such as painting, sculpture, performance, photography and video. Building from a hemispheric perspective, the show explores a set of strategies and themes resonating across the production of artists in the Latin America and Caribbean’s Asian diasporas. 

The exhibition embraces and performs the notion of appearance, borrowed from the title of an artwork by Lydia Okumura, a Japanese Brazilian artist living in New York City since the mid–1970s, to explore its various related meanings and implications. From the act of appearing and becoming visible—including the different types of apparitions—to the idea of impression and physical semblance, artists in the show grapple with the complex ways through which to negotiate (in)visibility, revisit and re-elaborate family archives and stories, and engage and reconfigure spiritual practices. The show also addresses abstraction as a formal strategy, as it connects to language, the senses, and the body, in the context of postwar hemispheric American art. 

Conceived as a form of appearance in itself, the show sheds light into often overlooked experiences and artistic trajectories of Asian diasporic subjects and collectivities across Latin America and the Caribbean—as both peculiar to and constitutive of broader local, national and transnational histories.

To accompany the show, we will present a series of public programs and publish a catalogue. 

The exhibition will be co-curated by Tie Jojima, associate curator and manager of exhibitions at Americas Society, and Yudi Rafael, independent curator based in São Paulo, Brazil.