Into View: Monthly Reading Group
Intimate gallery conversations with local artists and authors around selected readings and works featured in Into View: New Voices, New Stories.
Ticket includes General Admission (Thursdays after 5 PM are half off). Space is limited.
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.
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.
ABOUT THE HOSTS
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Vivian L. Huang is assistant professor of race and performance studies in the Department of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Huang’s first book Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (Duke University Press, 2022) articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability — such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding — to express Asian American life.
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Naz Cuguoglu is the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Programs at the Asian Art Museum. Originally from Istanbul, she has curated exhibitions and programs internationally at documenta fifteen, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the Walters Art Museum, and the 15th Istanbul Biennial, and locally at the Wattis Institute, Berkeley Art Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Slash. Cuguoglu previously held positions at KADIST, the de Young Museum, and SFMOMA. Her writing has been featured in SFMOMA Open Space, Art Asia Pacific, Hyperallergic, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.
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Padma Dorje Maitland is the Malavalli Family Foundation Associate Curator, Art of the Indian Subcontinent.
Top image: Installation view of Into View: New Voices, New Stories. Photograph © Asian Art Museum.
Into View: New Voices, New Stories is organized by the Asian Art Museum.
Sustained support generously provided by the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Endowment Fund for Exhibitions and the Kao/Williams Contemporary Art Exhibitions Fund.
