Not all the artists in “Asian-American Abstraction” are Asian-American, but no matter. Who can tell the difference anyway?
Think I’m joking? The gallery, Hollis Taggart, asks just that. Wall text roughly midway through poses the question, and not even a checklist of works stops to answer. Take as long as you like with a challenging summer group show, through September 7. It is not the only summer group show to take American abstraction overseas and back, and I work this together with a recent report on “Americans in Paris” as a longer review and my latest upload.
Nearly fifty artists, past and present, fill both floors of the gallery for “Asian-American Abstraction” and who are they anyway? They show the influence of East Asian tradition, but also Abstract Expressionism—and there, too, you may have trouble untangling the threads. Don Ahn, for one, works with an eye to calligraphy, but with ink spatters as well. He may have you marveling at the sheer control of Chinese “Companions in Solitude” before him and, in a very different way, drip painting from Jackson Pollock. And then a second work adds a glowing yellow that not even Pollock could know. Ming Wang has her own descending black brush, but also an accordion book of pages twice “letter” size, to accommodate so much more.
Influence here runs every which way—all the more so in a room that includes Abstract Expressionists, too. It also bears text with that stubborn question. Franz Kline has his seeming calligraphy, but then so does Robert Rauschenberg in characters of his own invention. Black for Sheila Isham spirals down a red canvas as Song of the Palace, while Michael West is Drunk with Turpentine. Vivian Springford, like West (surprise!) a long-neglected woman artist, applies acrylic stains in near concentric circles. You may think of Georgia O’Keeffe or Morris Louis, but she had her first solo show in Tokyo, and she credits the influence of Walasse Ting, from Shanghai on his way to America.
If those artists looked to Chinese art, Chinese Americans had their versions of modern art as well. Ivy Wu brings almost Pop Art colors and well-defined geometry to her calligraphy, while Oonju Chan paints on open fields out of Joan Mitchell. Think, then, that you really cannot know the difference? Think again. Just to describe them is to see them as individuals. Those without a signature style can get lost along the way.
Abstract Expressionists relied heavily on their signature, like Kline’s monumental characters. Adolph Gottlieb has one of his characteristic explosions, of one symbol atop another. Sam Francis has his splotches of red, yellow, and black. They are easy enough to recognize even in relatively small works on paper. 
Chinese Americans, by comparison, can be more intricate or more fluid. You may pass that test after all.
Nor does it really come down to Asia and America. Postwar American artists had many influences and many that they influenced. Were they formal or gestural? Were they the heirs to Cubism, Surrealism, or something else again? Where they as American as the Hudson River School, which they admired as well? More and more, too, curators are looking beyond Abstract Expressionist New York to a global movement. Asians, say, had their share starting around 1954, in Gutai.
The question still matters, and it sets this show apart. It asks one to look beyond major works and heavy hitters. It asks, too, to well-known artists as infinitely changeable. Who would have thought of Rauschenberg as an abstract painter? He rejected all that, right? You might have to read his indecipherable letters to find out.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.