A current exhibition at the Middlebury College Museum of Art offers a refreshing shock to viewers whose exposure to art history has reached Europe and North America. No Ocean Between Us spotlights, as its subtitle explains, “The Art of Asian Diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1945-Present.” While cultural crosscurrents exist in every corner of the globe, the unique fusions of Japanese, Chinese, and Southeast Asian traditions with those south of the US border are fascinating to contemplate.
Specifically, the museum’s text notes, the 70 works include paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, and mixed media pieces created by artists from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. No Ocean Between Us was developed and toured by International Arts & Artists in collaboration with the Organization of American States Art Museum of the Americas, both in Washington, DC
A hallmark of the exhibition is the artists’ interaction with major art movements spanning the border since the mid-20th century.
The very name of one of the artists, Carlos Runcie Tanaka (born 1958), indicates a mixed heritage – in his case, Peruvian, English and Japanese. Although Tanaka trained as a potter in Japan and Peru, his “Cloud/Nube” installation consists of two wall-mounted video screens and 36 white paper origami crabs suspended from the ceiling. The latter are brightly lit and cast dancing shadows on a nearby wall.
In 1994, the wall text explains, Tanaka began “a series of installations based on the concepts of memory, travel and displacement.” One of the videos shows how he used the crab as a migratory symbol: On Cerro Azul beach in Cañete, Peru, an obelisk commemorates the arrival, in 1899, of the first Japanese. Around its base lie thousands of dead crabs, submerged by the tide. Origami serves as a metaphor “for the Japanese grandfather he never knew.”
The internationally renowned Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam (1902-1982), who died in Paris, was of Congolese, Cuban and Chinese descent. Heavily influenced by African artistic and spiritual traditions, he created paintings and sculptures that also reflected modern European masters, including Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso. Lam’s lithograph included in this exhibition, “Retrato,” depicts the head and torso of a dark-skinned woman with braided hair and a featureless face.
The Chinese ancestry of Panamanian artist Manuel Choy Loo (b. 1981) is evident in his 2016 assemblage “Ma-Chok”. An architectural construction using 175 oversized mah-jongg tiles could be an homage to Lego. The artist is known as SUMO in the Panama City graffiti scene and has worked in that medium internationally.
Several paintings in “No Ocean Between Us” fit squarely into the abstract expressionist camp, and brilliant color bursts forth abundantly from each of them. An example: the aptly titled “Verde” (photo) by Tikashi Fukushima (1920-2001). Born in Japan, he immigrated to Brazil after World War II and worked for a time on a coffee plantation. His artwork gradually evolved from traditional landscapes, still lifes and portraits to bold gestural abstractions. As the wall text explains, Fukushima has imbued his work with “the colors of the tropical landscape of Brazil” and the “economy and fluidity of line of Zen Buddhist painting.”
Vast oceans actually separate continents, and immigrants often find themselves unwelcome in a new land. But this exhibition serves as a timely reminder that cultural integration can bring us the best of all worlds.
“No Ocean Between Us” runs through December 11.
