Confronting Anti-Asian Racism in Art and Visual Culture Education

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRyan ShinRyan Shin, Professor, Art and Visual Culture Education, School of Art, University of Arizona in Tucson. Email: shin@email.arizona.eduJaehan BaeJaehan Bae, Professor of Art Education, Department of Art, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh in Oshkosh. Email: baej@uwosh.eduBorim SongBorim Song, Associate Professor of Art Education, School of Art & Design, East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. Email: songb@ecu.eduNotes1 A popular trope stereotyping Asian women is the Dragon Lady, featured as cunning and deceitful. The Dragon Lady uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation but often is emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity. A contemporary example of the Dragon Lady is the Japanese Yakuza leader O-Ren Ishii (played by Lucy Liu) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Tarantino, 2003 Tarantino, Q. (Director). (2003). Kill Bill Vol. 1 [Film]. Miramax. [Google Scholar]). Another popular stereotype is the Lotus of Blossom. Memoirs of a Geisha (Marshall, 2005 Marshall, R. (Director). (2005). Memoirs of a geisha [Film]. Columbia Pictures. [Google Scholar]) epitomizes the Lotus of Blossom (sometimes called the China Doll) trope as feminine, shy, fragile, subservient, and sexually submissive. In Mean Girls (Waters, 2004 Waters, M. (Director). (2004). Mean girls [Film]. Paramount Pictures. [Google Scholar]), the names of two Asian girl students are Trang Pak (played by Ky Pham) and Sun Jin Dinh (played by Danielle Nguyen); both these names are mash-ups of Vietnamese and Korean family names. In this film, the most problematic story of Asian woman stereotypes is that the two Asian high schoolers (Trang Pak and Sun Jin Dinh) are both entangled in a romance with their much older White gym teacher, Coach Carr (played by Dwayne Hill), a joke that underlines the fetishizing of Asian women.2 The series of Asian women portrait posters can be downloaded at https://www.istillbelieve.nyc/downloads.3 Monyee Chau’s poster can be downloaded at https://www.chinesebornamerican.com/weareresilient.4 All student names in this article are pseudonyms.