Ala Ebtekar

San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, August 11, 2023
by Kenneth Baker

Born in the United States and raised here and in Iran by his Iranian parents, Ebtekar finds himself positioned to respond as few American artists can to contemporary geopolitical crises.

His work stages its own confrontations of tradition and postmodernity, reflecting mutely on graver, more literal ones in the world at large.

In "Ascension" (2007), Ebtekar has drawn and painted images in acrylic and ink on the separated pages of a Farsi religious text mounted on canvas. A figure casually based on the winged phoenix seen in ancient Mesopotamian art dominates. Around it, through stylized clouds from Persian or East Asian sources, fall various bombs and missiles.

Perhaps a reader of Farsi could find specific meaning in these dissonances blotting out these specific pages. Most of us will see the piece as evoking doomed dreams of spiritual refuge from high-tech violence.

Ebtekar's manner of working on splayed pages may bring to mind some of the unforgettable collaborative works of Tim Rollins and KOS. In fact, as a teenager, Ebtekar was one of the Kids of Survival and now has found his own uses for their practice of responding to books by imposing images on them.

Asian-American Art: Insiders Looking Out
Newsweek: International Editions
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14968232/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/
By Vibhuti Patel
Oct. 2, 2006

The 17 young artists represented in a dazzling new show at New York's Asia Society all have roots in Asia. But all grew up in the United States and display little nostalgia for any abandoned homeland or lost way of life. Indeed, the works on display in "One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now" (through Dec. 10) may reveal traces of ancestral influence, but mostly show a real affection for and intimate grasp of the complex jumble of colors, tastes, textures and landscapes that make up America.

Unlike their Asian-born predecessors, who immigrated to the United States and always considered themselves outsiders looking in, these artists are not obsessed with self, multiculturalism or identity politics. Instead, their choice of subjects and technique is diverse, outward-looking and—as the show's title, taken from a 1978 Blondie hit, makes clear—grounded in pop culture. Iranian-American Ala Ebtekar moved from Berkeley, California, to Tehran at 19 to study miniature paintings. But he ended up preferring "coffeehouse painting"— large oils that illustrate oral narratives instead of the more highbrow classical written texts from which Persian miniatures are usually drawn. His huge whitewashed installation juxtaposes boom boxes and sneakers that hark back to his urban

U.S. childhood with objects from 19th-century Iranian coffeehouses: samovars, cups, hookahs, cushioned sofas and wall paintings of wrestler heroes revered by Iranian working classes. Other artists borrow the technique but not the subject matter of their ancestors. Pakistani-American Saira Wasim returns consciously to the tradition of classical Mughal miniature painting. But instead of the hunting, battles and royal entertainments those works depicted, she chooses as her subjects Bush and Blair, Cheney and Rumsfeld, the Iraq war. By contrast, Indian-American Chitra Ganesh uses everyday objects and materials to create murals that seem to jump off the wall to create images of psychic conflict and pain. Her site-specific work revolves around a multi-limbed, multi-eyed calendar-art goddess, painted in the style of commercial Bollywood posters. The figure is covered in beads, plastic—the ubiquitous furniture covering for new immigrants—fake hair and ethnic kitchen tools, reminiscent of the mythological comic books she grew up on.

Most of the artists represented are under 35 and 70 percent of them—as well as the exhibit's three curators—are women. That makes for a refreshing perspective. One theme explored over and over again is the individual versus the collective; Jean Shin gathered 75 used sweaters from the Asian-American art community for her installation. She deconstructed each sweater by unraveling it, then researched who in the community was connected to whom and mapped their relationships through the intertwining yarn. The result is a work of crisscrossing strands that drape around columns and hang from walls to create a netlike web—a metaphor for community. For performance artist Xavier Cha, the individual is subsumed not into the collective but in the work itself: she fills a giant wicker "Horn of Plenty" with shiny colorful fruits and vegetables—and for the opening, buried herself under the props so only her bare feet stuck out. The artists also poignantly document Asia's influence on American life. Californian Indigo Som photographed

Chinese restaurants in the Deep South states of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee—places with small Asian populations. She found eateries that were, she says, "lonely and mysterious, in the middle of nowhere, that tell how Asians have impacted mainstream U.S. life—we've not been invisible. These mom-and-pop shops serve compromised Chinese food to young people who are looking for something different ... to whom [it] feels like another country."

And as every artist knows, foreignness is hardly necessary to create a sense of alienation. Videographer Laurel Nakadate directs her camera's gaze at herself and the lonely, single, middle-aged men she picks up on the street and invites, literally, to play. "There is something about playing pretend that is secret and sexy and lonely and at times a little dangerous," she says. But if "One Way or Another" is any indication, Asian-American artists certainly don't need to play pretend. They have found the real thing.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc., © 2006 MSNBC.com
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14968232/site/newsweek/

Defying The Definitive Museums
The New York Sun
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/39699
BY DANIEL KUNITZ
September 14, 2023

To what degree does an artist's heritage inform his work? It is a particularly American question, since, no matter how deep our roots in this soil may dig, all of us have, to some degree, a multiple identity. But so what? Shouldn't an American artist be considered an artist foremost, an American as a second thought, and a hyphenated identity as an afterthought?

These are the sorts of questions implicitly — and explicitly — raised by "One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now," which opens today at Asia Society. To their credit, the team of three curators here worry these issues without over heating or spoiling the stew with dogma: In the end, they agreed that, as their wall text reads, "The artists and their work defy a definitive conception of Asian American art."

Viewers will be happy to note that the majority of the 17 contributors are artists first; they don't seem any more concerned with these questions than Irish Americans or Italian Americans or Mexican Americans, which is to say, some are and some aren't. I can't tell you what part of his lineage got Glenn Kaino into the exhibition, but his artistic heritage, evident in "Graft" (2006), includes Damien Hirst. Made specifically for this show, the work consists of a salmon and a pig, sewn together from sharkskin and cowhide respectively, each propped in a vitrine. Conceptually, it lofts broad ideas about hybrid identities as well as our nip-and-tuck culture; visually, the two creatures have an at once cute and Frankensteinian appeal. Only a few of the artists here work in modes that draw directly on ancestral styles — not surprisingly, they tend to be among the minority who were not born in this country. Taking cues from Chinese brush painting, Jiha Moon, who was born in Korea, makes splashily energetic paintings in ink and acrylic, which exploit ambiguous, or surreal, elements — disembodied mouths, rainbows, wispy or gestural brushstrokes-to form semiabstract canvases.

Pakistan-born Saira Wasim is the only included artist speaking in an overtly political voice. Her miniature paintings use the old Mughal style to comment on the present day — a fertile micro- genre now over a decade old. In one gouache, "New World Order" (2006), President Bush sits atop a globe composed of roiling animals, a tiny Pervez Musharraf on his lap, while a much smaller Tony Blair, grinning idiotically, shelters an infant-size Hamid Karzai. Others employ modern techniques while referring to Asian history or culture. Among the most striking examples here is Binh Danh's "One Week's Dead #2" (2006). Originally from Vietnam, Mr. Danh reproduces pages from Life magazine's photo roster of the dead in the Vietnam War on tree leaves, using chlorophyll print and resin. It's a powerful mix of allusions: to the poet Shelley's trope of the dead as fallen leaves, to the tree of life, to the current American war. Mr. Danh wields history like a weapon. Ala Ebtekar freely mixes history with contemporary culture. For the show, he constructed a Persian-style coffeehouse, complete with benches, hookahs, pillows, and boom boxes, all painted white. On the walls hang old photographs of Iranian or Persian wrestlers; on the floor he has parked sets of removed sneakers.

Naturally, the greater proportion of artists here work in idioms that seem as international as the Internet. The ever-resourceful Jean Shin asked members of the Asian American arts community to donate sweaters and woven garments, which she then partly unraveled to create a beautiful, Web-like sculptural installation leading one simultaneously through the museum's architecture and among the connections between individuals (as represented by their clothing).

Chitra Ganesh has also created a site-specific work for this exhibition, a mural collage.Wall-sized, the piece layers tinted washes, colored plastic, and drawings of fantastic, anthropomorphic creatures. Indigo Som serves up three compelling photographs from the series "Mostly Mississippi: Chinese Restaurants of the South" (2004–06). And, though they lurk like chameleons in the urban underbrush, Kaz Oshiro's three-dimensional paintings, on acrylic and canvas, mimicking everyday objects — a trash bin, a microwave oven — once seen become instantly recognizable.

So too are Laurel Nakadate's inimitable videos. Disturbing, hilarious, sexy, tender, and brilliant, hers are some of the most accomplished videos currently being made.At 15 minutes, "I Want To Be the One To Walk in the Sun" (2006) links a number of vignettes, in which the music playing is crucial and no other sounds are heard: the artist in a Western convenience store attempting, and failing, to persuade the bearded counter man to strip with her; the artist dancing, in jeans and boots, on the porch of a white neo-Gothic house to Neil Young's "Heart of Gold," as a slight wind shakes the camera; dancing in what looks like a bordello from the old West, dressed like a tart, while a dog humps her leg; she and a notably unattractive middle-aged man stripping to their underwear and then silently directing each other to spin like tops, all to the sounds of "What About Love" by Heart.

Compared to this carnival of genres and emotions, Patty Chang's video "A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West" (no date because it remains a work in progress), wherein two people, a man and a woman, seem to take turns translating from an article by Walter Benjamin about Anna May Wong, is as airless and musty as an old schoolroom.

"One Way or Another" takes its title from a song by Blondie, and it could as easily describe the attitudes of a generation of artists whatever their ethnicity. Which is another way of saying that this show demonstrates that Asian-American art, like contemporary art in general, is, if not a mixing pot, then a cauldron abubble with highly effective potions.

Stripteases, Sheiks, Sneakers Are Today's Asian-American Art
Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=home&sid=ac5Z14oJnwj4
By Carly Berwick
September 12, 2023

A paunchy man with long, stringy hair takes off his shirt, prompting a young, nubile woman opposite him to take off hers. It is a most discomfiting striptease. But the video, part of ``One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now'' at New York's Asia Society, is not documenting the casual exploitation of a defenseless girl by a venal predator. Laurel Nakadate, the artist, is also the performer. In her underwear, she twirls her finger, indicating that the man should turn around; he follows her hand like a marionette. Lithe and pretty, Nakadate has total power over this quivering mess. The 30-year-old, half-Japanese artist travels around the country, looking for single men to seduce on-camera. Her performance is shameless and cruel, yet risky and transfixing.

But what does this have to do with being an American of Asian ancestry? Very little, and that is the primary and most valuable lesson of ``One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now.'' Asian American visual culture today can be almost anything, a sign of the diversity of the more than 12 million people of Asian heritage living in the U.S.

The 17 artists in the exhibition hail from Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines, New York and California. They were all born after 1965 and came of age when the battle lines over identity politics and ethnic visibility had already been drawn and redrawn. Their work has little in common, other than the use of ethnicity, more or less subtly, as subject matter.

Obvious Work

Some of the art is just plain silly, overdetermined by statement-making. Saira Wasim, for instance, combines traditions of Pakistani miniatures and British-American magazine illustration to paint what are essentially translations of ``no blood for oil'' protest signs into narrative paintings.

In one, Bush embraces a Saudi sheik while holding a gas nozzle that pours into a shared wine goblet. The title, in case we didn't get it, is "Blood Brothers'' (2006). Indigo Som's grainy digital photographs of Chinese restaurants in Mississippi reveal that they are lonely, unkempt places located in poor neighborhoods, a fact most discerning travelers already know.

Works by Patty Chang, Mari Eastman, Ala Ebtekar, Glenn Kaino and Anna Sew Hoy are more sophisticated, playing simultaneously with national and art-historical traditions. Eastman's filmy rococo paintings of palaces and songbirds moodily reflect the Western idealization of Chinese and Japanese art.

Wear This Art?

If I could steal one item from the show it would be a navy- blue track jacket embroidered with a scene from a Persian miniature by Ebtekar. His installation, ``Elemental'' (2004), recreates an Iranian coffee shop, painted in white and studded with Adidas sneakers, boom-boxes and hookahs. The sneaker laces have Persian floral motifs and also inspire consumer lust.

In his artist statement, Ebtekar writes that he is looking at links between hip-hop and Iranian coffee-house culture, both of which encourage graffiti. But the installation is just as much about the thirst for beautiful objects and the shared appreciation of nice stuff -- an impulse that transcends just about any cultural boundary.

Copyright Gallery Paule Anglim
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