Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001
Edited by Howie Chen
Primary Information, 2021
Paperback, 12 x 9 in.
552 pages
$30.00
WPA Note:
This book surveys a collective of artists organizing to build community and critical discourse. While not directly connected with WPA, Godzilla is an historically important example of artist-organizing to build community and critical discourse.
Description:
Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 is a comprehensive anthology of writings, art projects, publications, correspondence, organizational documents, and other archival ephemera from the trailblazing Asian artist collective. Edited by curator Howie Chen, this publication includes full essays and contextual material detailing the critical genealogies embodied by the group as well as its wide-ranging activities.
The collective known as Godzilla: Asian American Art Network was formed in 1990 to support the production of critical discourse around Asian American art and increase the visibility of Asian American artists, curators, and writers, who were negotiating a historically exclusionary society and art world. Founded by Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida, Godzilla produced exhibitions, publications, and community collaborations that sought to stimulate social change through art and advocacy. For more than a decade, the diasporic group, having grown from a local organization into a nationwide network, confronted institutional racism, Western imperialism, anti-Asian violence, the AIDS crisis, and representations of Asian sexuality and gender, among other urgent issues.
About the Author(s):
Howie Chen is a New York–based curator involved in collaborative art production and research. Chen is a founder of Dispatch, a curatorial production office and project space founded in New York City, later transitioning to a peripatetic exhibition model. Dispatch offers a model for curatorial production: an office for receiving and originating exhibitions, projects, and concepts treated as time-sensitive transmissions. He has organized exhibitions and programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Kitchen, Circuit (Switzerland), IMO (Copenhagen) among others.