Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability

by Vivian L. Huang

In Surface Relations Vivian L. Huang traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Following inscrutability in literature, visual culture, and performance art since 1965, Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability—such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding—to express Asian American life. Through analyses of diverse works by performance artists (Tehching Hsieh, Baseera Khan, Emma Sulkowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi), writers (Kim Fu, Kai Cheng Thom, Monique Truong), and video, multimedia, and conceptual artists (Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Mika Tajima), Huang challenges neoliberal narratives of assimilation that erase Asianness. By using sound, touch, and affect, these artists and writers create new frameworks for affirming Asianness as a source of political and social critique and innovative forms of life and creativity.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Asian American, Academic

240 pages, Hardcover

Published November 18, 2022

Reviews

[Livia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my favorite reading for this class so far, really interesting argument about inscrutability in art that I never would have thought about. Applied this analysis to Asian American performance & visual artists, famous ones like Yoko Ono, Emma Sulkowicz, & Yayoi Kusama and ones I wasn't familiar with like Laurel Nakadate. Explores inscrutability, hospitality, racialized gender, performance, immigration, distance, promiscuity, queerness, negativity, silence, all that good stuff. This was very much a VMS reading so felt like a nice little return to that form. AAADs can veer super historical or get more literary, abstract, based in art, etc., and I have so much fun in those moments (again, eternal love of the vms department) – ex. like how Andrea Long Chu's The Mixed Asian Metaphor is the foundation of my brain pyramid. Also loved the mentions of Ocean Vuong, my queen Cathy Park Hong, Lisa Lowe, Kandice Chuh etc etc. I feel like the whole field of Asian American studies is just exciting right now.

Some quotes:

"Can Asian femininity exist beside white masculinity without bodying forth a posture of sacrificial host? Can a hospitable posture, embodied by an Asian woman, be interpreted otherwise?"

"Any future relies on the Asian woman's compulsory heterosexuality, reproductive labor, and self-sacrifice. The plot quickly moves on from the Asian woman's suicide by sentimentalizing her legacy as carried on by her child. Thus, the Asian woman's future is paradoxically secured through biological reproduction and self-obliteration, all in the name of love. Her narrative value lies in a biologically dead and biologically reproductive future."

"Within minoritarian aesthetics of obfuscation, a point is necessarily a moving approximation to foster curiosity for the limits of figuration, allowing questions not only of violence and erasure but also of emergence of potentiality." They should laser print this on a block of wood and BONK everyone on the head who ever made a tourist trap infinity room and didn't pay YAYOI KUSAMA one MILLION dollars for it.

"Eng and Han's influential theory of racial mourning and melancholia suggests to me a correlative racial visual register, relevant to loss that neither multicultural nor neoliberal optics can bring into the visual field as more than a haunting or spectral form." – I feel like this literally leads right into ALC's whole thing about the modern conception of Asian Americanness manifesting as a "mild chronic homesickness" because of this feeling that something is missing but it isn't clear what – and the conclusion here is literally called "Something is Missing" everything CONNECTS!!

Side note for Tanwi if she ever checks Goodreads again – of course they went to Tisch.

[Sohum · Rating 4 out of 5]

totally magnificent archive, though I think the intervention is rather slight (and the writing sometimes read as a dissertation, though I suspect that's only because it probably was?)

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love chapter 4 Im/penetrability, Trans Figuration, and Unreliable Surfacing. There is a gentleness in the writing.

[Jiewei Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

4/16 update: I appreciate this so much more the second time around.

Pretty academic, but incredibly interesting and well-argued arguments and case studies.