My dissertation examines how artists have addressed postcolonial trauma, racialization, and gendered labor while negotiating US identity politics. In particular, I trace a genealogy of Asian American artists whose works have challenged identity-based categorization in ways that have not yet been sufficiently recognized by scholars.

The four chapters investigate writings and works by artists from different ethnic descents: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950), Simon Leung (b. 1964), and Martin Wong (1946–1999). I argue that these artists employed various approaches—such as fragmented language, endurance performances, racialized embodiment, and hybrid cultural elements—to disrupt the essentialized, monolithic construct of Asian Americanness predicated by US imperialism.

Chapter 1 examines the work of Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, specifically her displacement of language and manipulation of film images to mirror the Korean collective consciousness, with its repressed memories of war and colonial violence. Invoking Sigmund Freud’s concept of screen memory, I argue that the repetition and misspellings in Cha’s films, which refuse to re-present her traumatic memories of war, reject a literal depiction of colonial trauma.

Chapter 2 delves into One Year Performances (1978–1986) by Taiwanese-born artist Tehching Hsieh. I consider how Hsieh’s yearlong performances, particularly Cage Piece (1978–1979), Time Clock Piece (1980–1981), and Outdoor Piece (1981–1982), appropriate what I call “misinterpellating mechanisms.” That is, in these performances, the artist adopted self-disciplinary rules, including incarceration and surveillance through photo documentation, to invoke his undocumented, illegal “alien” identity under US immigration law. Hsieh’s “life work” also poses existential inquiries into the temporal, physical, and mental confinement of our being in the world.

Chapter 3 examines a 1990s trilogy by Hong Kong–born artist Simon Leung on “the residual space of the Vietnam War,” as he put it. Focusing on Squatting Projects Berlin (1994) and Surf Vietnam (1992–1998), the first part of the chapter articulates how Leung mobilized racialized embodiment (the Asian squatting body), colonial connotative activity (surfing), and US mass media’s fetishization of Vietnam to reveal the quotidian violence toward Asian immigrants in the United States and Germany. The reconsideration of racialized Asian subjects as signifiers of gendered, exploited, servile bodies resonates with Karen Shimakawa’s positioning of Asian Americanness as an abject part of US national subject formation. The second part of the chapter analyzes Warren Piece (in the ’70s) (1992–1993), which centers around the exile of Warren Niesłuchowski, a Polish American Vietnam War deserter.

Chapter 4 analyzes the works of queer Chinese American artist Martin Wong—in writing (calligraphic handscrolls, sign language, and zodiac signs) and in urban landscape painting (brick buildings and prisons). Specifically, I pay attention to the penetrable (the interior spaces), impenetrable (spaces blocked by brick walls and metal gates), and composition (the juxtaposition of finger spelling and architecture) in Wong’s paintings from his New York period. His oeuvre fabricates a vibrant image of outlawed, queer, and marginalized immigrant communities through the synthesis of hybrid cultural elements. This chapter also examines Wong’s exploration of his “Chinese-ness” and its entanglement with gender-bending characters and queerness in his Chinatown series (c. 1982–1994).
 

The artists who I study are canonical or renowned: Cha’s Dictée (1982) has influenced postwar, diasporic literature and Asian American studies; Hsieh is recognized as having established the canon for endurance performance; Leung is known for his project-based work on questions of ethics, immigration, and representation of states; and Wong was a celebrated figure in New York City’s subculture and the Nuyorican movement in the 1980s and 1990s. While prior scholars have interpreted these artists as consolidating “Asian American art,” I elaborate on how their work addressed postcolonial trauma and complicated migrant subjectivity, denouncing identity-based discourses within US multiculturalism and the categories of US art institutions.

Methodologically, these artists’ practices prompt a reconsideration of Asian American art as such. Their experiments with multilingualism, deconstructive language, labor embodiment, and hybrid cultural referents blur the dichotomy between post-structuralist/formalist and culturally specific understandings of art. My dissertation theorizes the in-betweenness and displacement that so often characterizes the work of Asian American artists, reading across a diverse range of media—poetry, film, performance, painting, calligraphy, and photography—and focusing on the intertextuality among them.

The Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellowship allowed me to advance my dissertation and complete necessary research. I was able to interview Leung and attend his talk on Hsieh at Dia Chelsea. Hsieh’s retrospective at Dia Beacon and Cha’s exhibition at BAMPFA this past year have also been illuminating for my work. I further conducted comprehensive archival research on Wong at the New York University Fales Library and Special Collections and on his Chinatown series at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. I extend my gratitude to the artists I study, as their work informs my thinking on identity and subjectivity.

University of Rochester
Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2025–2026

Under the auspices of the Meliora Digital and Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship from the University of Rochester, Hsin-Yun Cheng will complete her dissertation over the 2026–2027 academic year.