Contradictions and Continuity: Constructing Asian American Political and Aesthetic Subjectivities in the Work of Ruth Asawa

Abstract

Considering contradiction and continuity as a framework to examine the aesthetic and political subjectivities in Ruth Asawa’s work, this essay explores how the visual grammar of contradiction and continuity became a generative force for the artist to negotiate the politics of Asian American citizenship, and navigate various roles and responsibilities as an Asian American woman artist. Through a critical engagement with works by contemporary Asian American and feminist theorists such as Lisa Lowe and Anne Anlin Cheng, it raises issues of the ornamental, domesticity, citizenship, and otherness as a backdrop of Asawa’s Asian American subjectivity, and argues that Asawa’s work needs to be understood simultaneously within and against the rhetoric of binaries of inside and outside, that both articulates and establishes the boundaries of citizenship.